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Far Away but Still So Near

Life in Osijek!

— Julia Leppänen

Beautiful Croatia, surprising Osijek and facts about nurses.

Life in Osijek!!

We were thinking that Osijek is a small village where you can’t explore or find anything except one cathedral. But we were wrong! Osijek is a beautiful city, where you can find many restaurants, cafes, nice views, bars, shops and a really beautiful old town and a BEACH!!!! People don’t speak English so well in here but they are nice and kind, that is most important. Osijek has a lot of students so it’s perfect for us! If I have to say something “bad” about Osijek it’s the prices of apartments… they are higher than in Finland. Also in here every shop is closed on Sundays, so better to remember do groceries before Sunday.

We are doing a traineeship in hospital and we have seen and explored a lot of different things in there. There are some of similarities between our and Croatian health care. But there is a lot of differences too. For example patients here don’t have any privacy during procedures. And the hygiene is not so good either.

Few words about Croatian nurses. They are so so knowledgeable and hard workers. They study for 10 years?? It’s sad that they can’t choose a ward where they would want to work. They will work where the boss says, it’s crazy. And they do really long days in here too and the salary is not that good…

Funny fact. In Finland every nurse wears socks on top of theirs scrubs, including us. And now in Osijek we have been getting comments from local nurses about how we wear our socks. They always laughing and wondering what is the point of that and I think that everybody recognises us from the socks.

We have been traveling in a few different places near to the seaside and wow it’s so beautiful and peaceful! Croatia is a really beautiful country and you can always find something to do and see.

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