Blood, Soccer, and Worthless German Netflix

After two exciting weekends featuring Karneval and Amsterdam, I could think of nothing more relaxing to do than attending a German fussball (soccer) match.  On Saturday, our entire group took a train to Leverkusen to watch Bayer 04 play  FC Freiburg.  In American terms, this is basically the Denver Broncos playing the Jacksonville Jaguars.  Freiburg did put up a good fight against Bayer, however, and the match was very enjoyable.  Bayer scored about midway through the first half to make it 1-0.  There were several more scoring chances for both sides, but neither team managed another goal so the game ended Bayer Leverkusen-1, FC Freiburg-0.

I believe the best comparison to a Bundesliga match would be a college football game, so I'll explain some similarities/differences I noticed.  Bayer's stadium has a really cool design, but it is very small compared to most SEC football stadiums (minus Vanderbilt lol).  The attendance at this particular match was about 25,000 people, while Texas A&M averaged over 100,000 people this season.  That is not to say that the German soccer fans were not loud, though.  At one end of the pitch there was the "rowdy fan section," complete with a yell leader, hundreds of flags, and thousands of males proudly sporting bright red scarves.  They were doing spirited yells and songs throughout the entire match, and, as an Aggie, I was impressed with their loudness/coordination.  Some other differences I noticed were the fenced-off section for the away fans, the large number of security guards for such a small stadium (especially near the away fans), and the lack of a national anthem sung at the start of the match.  I have discovered, however, that many Germans do not actually know their national anthem.  In the same vein, there are zero German flags to be seen around Bonn (or anywhere, really) because Germans are very sensitive to being nationalistic ever since some guy named Hitler got elected.

Of course, like all Americans, I was anticipating this past weekend because of Netflix's release of the new season of House of Cards.  To my horror, I opened the Netflix app only to discover that season 3 was not there.  I consulted the German Netflix twitter account which said that House of Cards S3 will be released in Germany in...3 months.  Disgusting.  Of all things, this has to be my greatest complaint about Germany thus far.  I really hope that Chancellor Merkel can get this country together soon.

On Monday, we had the unique opportunity to watch a surgery up close at Uniklinik, Bonn University's teaching hospital.  I was paired with an anesthesiologist who showed me into the operating room where there was already a patient lying on the table knocked out on opiates.  The patient had a tumor in her gut which was to be removed by the surgeon.  The operation was very long-it started at eight and by the time I left at one they still were not finished.  The whole procedure was very interesting to observe, but I was particularly interested in the monitoring systems set up to keep track of the patient's vital information and the amount of anesthetics being put into her body.  I think the most shocking part of the surgery to me was the lack of delicacy taken by the surgeon.  After carefully making a large incision down her abdomen, he took 4 hooks and literally cranked them as hard as could until the patient was as open as possible.  Then, once inside, he just kind of moved the intestines around willy-nilly (which make really noodle-y sounds) until he found what he was looking for.  He finally removed a fairly large tumor and placed it in a nice plastic jar.  At this point, it was time for me to leave, so I didn't get full closure by seeing the patient get sewn back up, but we'll just assume the surgeon handled that without my careful observation.  I certainly have a greater appreciation for surgeons now, but watching him operate only confirmed my desire to stick to medical devices rather than surgery.

Tomorrow I start my spring break adventure traveling to Lisbon, Madrid, and Barcelona.  I'm super excited about the trips we have planned and all the cool new things I'll get to see.