Adventures in Europe, Part III

I thought I’d beaten whatever was getting me down right before Berlin into submission. Apparently not. It’d back as a full-blown flu.

Today was a couple firsts for me: my first experience with the German health care system, my first time crying since arriving in Germany, my first (and hopefully last) awkward hug from a sympathetic IES administrator.

I arrive at the “Praxis,” or doctor’s office, and sit in the waiting room I see immediately to the right of the entrance. I see no sign-in sheet, but I figure it’s like in France, where the doctor will just call you out in the order of your appointments anyways. If you’re not there, she’d just skip to the next person. So I sit there. Everyone in the room when I arrived gets seen. More people arrive, and they get seen. I’ve been there for an hour and a half, and they still don’t call my name. So a woman walks in, and I watch her walk past the waiting room. I follow her. It turns out you have to go to your doctor’s receptionist down the hall to check in. Oops. So I go in and apologize for being late. The receptionist gets terse with me and rolls her eyes once she figures out that this exchange goes beyond my German and I need to switch to English. “Why would I sit there for an hour and a half and not check in,” she snarls. Then she gives me a form to fill out. I don’t remember the post code of my dorm because I receive mail at the IES Center. She won’t take my IES Center address, and she yells at me again for not knowing the post code. “Don’t you understand how mail works? We NEED the post code!” Really irritated, I tell her that yelling at me won’t make me remember the post code and suggest she google it. (Which really would take less time than yelling at me to begin with.) Then I went to the bathroom and cried. It’s so frustrating how not having a solid grasp of the language can make you feel like a child. The simplest interactions require so much effort, and some people will always begrudge you for taking up extra time.

The doctor, by the way, was really nice. She more than made up for her witchy receptionist.

I was clearly frazzled when I got back to the IES Center to give them my “sick leave papers” and the receipt from my medicines. So Karin, a woman who is very nice one-on-one but also known to crack the whip when in a large group, smiles at me and gives me this big hug and doesn’t let go. I have the flu; I’d think being that close to me is the last thing anybody would want. Also, she never struck me as the cuddly type. Oh well.

I have tickets to Munich tomorrow. Wish me luck.