Flashback to Berlin!

Berlin was off to an interesting start, as Laura, Nicole, and I had gotten home from Alghero, Italy around 2am. And since Laura and I had not gotten our clean laundry back before Friday, we hadn't even started packing for this week long excursion. So after packing and showering as quickly as possible we still only got about 3hrs of sleep because we had to be at the Hofgarten by 6:30am. Not to mention, we had stayed up very late on Saturday WHILE in Alghero studying, and I had studied the whole plane ride, and basically the whole bus ride back from Frankfurt Hahn INSTEAD of sleeping, only to receive an e-mail when we got home telling us that we would not be taking our biochem test until the week after Berlin.... WOW... AWESOME... (we had planned on taking it during our bus ride to Berlin since that would be over 6hrs, and that way it would be over and we could enjoy Berlin, and not have a biochem and physiology test in the same week. But then, of course, we ended up having phys and biochem back to back the next week, but that's a different story entirely!) Anyways, since I didn't have the test anymore, I got to catch up on sleep on the bus ride! After a very long bus ride, we finally arrived in Berlin in the afternoon. 

We checked into the Hotel Alex, (I shared a room with L/L like usual) and then met up to go on a quick city bike tour. Our guide, Sion, was really interesting, and we got to see quite a bit, but I'm not sure it was an official tour, because there was a lot we didn't get to see.. (but maybe Berlin is just that big! I'm not sure!) While on the bike tour we saw different parts of the Berlin wall, watch towers, Checkpoint Charlie, the Jewish memorial, the Bundestag, and the Brandenburg Gate. But by the end of the tour we were all pretty cold and famished. 

Lauren and I at the start of the bike tour!

The Checkpoint Charlie Sign. 

Checkpoint Charlie!

Jewish memorial. There are no names, because we do not know the names of every Jew that was murdered or affected by the holocaust. The floor in between these massive blocks actually dips like waves, and by the time you reach the center the blocks are almost ten feet over you, giving a claustrophobic and uneasy feeling. (At least that was the intention of the artist.)

Brandenburg Gate with my girls! (Laura, Lauren, and Nicole)

 Tuesday we met bright and early to visit the Charité. Our guide was really interesting, and we got to see a lot of really neat exhibits. The Charité has the largest gallstone collection, and some of the stones were bigger than chicken eggs!!! They also had real, preserved human organs that showed what the tissue was supposed to look like, and then an example of what diseased tissue looked like. It was pretty neat! After the Charité tour, we had some free time for lunch, so a group of us went over to see the East Side Gallery.

East Side Gallery! "Stay Free"

East Side Gallery

After lunch we went back to the medical skills training center. There we had a short lecture on German medical schools, and how their programs are set up. Then came the fun stuff. :) We got to practive intubating a dummy, we listened to different heart sounds on a mechanical dummy (we listened to regular sounds, and then to either a stenotic or regurgitating valve and had to guess which!), they had a suit that basically consisted of a lot of braces and weights and there was supposed to imitate how it feels to be really old. You would have to lie down and then get back up, which was actually really difficult! They also had a bunch of different goggles you can wear that were supposed to mimic different optical diseases, I basically felt blind with all of them... And finally they had these awesome "tremor" gloves that sent tingling shocks through you hands to cause tremors.  We then had to try to write our name, and drink a glass of water. Let me just tell you, it was challenging enough to even pick up the pen! (Perhaps this was due to the pain that the shocks caused, whereas most patients don't feel shocking pain, they just can't stop the trembling of their hands, etc.) In fact, some of us tried to go all the way, but the pain was soo intense, and your poor hands would just distort themselves in strange ways. It almost looked like reptar hands! This was supposed to allow us to know how our patients with these kinds of issues will feel. (Trembling from old age or Parkinson's, etc.)

Wednesday morning we met up with our guide Sion again who accompanied us to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. I don't really have a lot to say about that, except that it was a very sobering and depressing experience. I simply don't understand how humanity can be so cruel...

"Work makes you free"
This statement might've been true for true criminals, but if you were Jewish, no amount of work would ever set you free. What's worse, is that even after being freed from the camp, many survivors went back to live, because they had no where else to go. After so many years away, they didn't always know the status of their families or homes.

"Neutral Zone" but if a prisoner step out into the sand that used to be there, the machine gunner had permission to shoot, no questions asked. 

 I ended up going back to study after that tour, but no regrets! We toured the Deutsch Bundestag that evening, which is the German government. (Kind of like our White House) As my interests involve science, this was far from my favorite part of the trip. But I guess it was good educational experience, and I certainly learned quite a bit! (About America and Germany! haha) And the view from the top spiral was pretty cool!

Thursday was, by far, my most favorite day! (Even though, of course, it decided to rain....) We started off the morning by checking out and heading to the natural history museum. (Our guide was little rude by trying to tell us that she would have to cut our tour short since we were late... ummm ok? We didn't really want a tour anyways.... hah) (I'm assuming since everyone had written about how much we had liked the natural history museum in Vienna, but hadn't had enough time to actually get to spend time and appreciate it, our coordinators interpreted that as we wanted a guided tour in Berlin....) Not to mention, our guide was CLEARLY not a science person, as she proceeded to tell us that the very tiny horse ancestor chose to evolve/grow bigger because bigger animals do not eat as much, when you compare the body weight/food intake ratio.... Well I might by that bigger animals might have a lower ratio...but that's definitely NOT going to cause an animal to "choose" to grow bigger...and reguardless, a larger horse with a smaller ratio will still out-eat a tiny horse with a large ratio anyday...  Anyways, we still got to see some pretty neat things! Like the tallest dinosaur exhibit in the world!

Example of the old style of stuffing an animal... thank goodness this has changed! (At the Natural History Museum)

The tallest dinosaur exhibit in the world!

 Then after the museum we got to go to the Berlin Zoo! :D So even though it was chilly and rainy, we persevered on, and boy am I glad we did! I hadn't been to a zoo in a long time, and I forgot how much I enjoy them. There's so many different animals that you never even think of until you see them! I thought it was especially neat to go in Germany, because I feel like they have a few different kinds of animals that we don't have in Texas. (but I could be wrong..) And after the aquarium it even stopped raining, aka: picture time! :D I will never forget the monkeys though... they are so interesting, and human-like, but don't appear to have the same self-concept as us. Especially the oragutan that Nicole and I saw who picked a MASSIVE booger and then proceeded to snack on it......

The otters were SOO adorable at the zoo! They kept barking and then swimming up to the glass right by our feet. And the one in the water here was playing with a gold coin!

Lions! They had to be brought inside due to the bad weather.  I had never been this close to a lion before!

That evening, around 6pm, we left Berlin and headed to Duderstadt. It was another long bus ride, but our hotel there was awesome! It was sooo big, and old styled, and even though I had to sleep on a pull-out couch, I basically had my own "living room" area to myself so L/L didn't wake me up in the morning! :D #happycamper 

Friday morning, we went and toured the Ottobock factory. I thoroughly enjoyed the "experiments" part of it, and actually getting to see how the prosthetics work. (I've never realized how much your foot does!) Then we had an interesting lecture from a worker who actually had a prosthetic leg, and who even got to go snowboarding with it! Talk about awesome! However, after the fun part, we had to actually tour the factory part....which was really long...and not exactly what I would consider "interesting." (For starters, I'm not an engineer, so I didn't really care how they build the prosthetics, and secondly, I have no desire to be a factory worker.. so I don't really care how things are boxed up, or how they are stored in really big warehouses....) But we survived, and then got to get back on the bus to head back to Bonn. 

The super neat double rainbow we saw on the bus ride home!

That week definitely flew by! And I wish I hadn't have had so much to study for so I could've enjoyed the city a little more...but what are you going to do? At this point we still had three weeks left!