#SB2k15

Ayy carumba! This was absolutely the most memorable and eventful spring break I’ve ever had and perhaps will remain as the superlative for the rest of my existence. Four plane rides in 9 days necessarily led to a large amount of time spent at the airport, but I have learned to enjoy my time hanging out at hubs for mass transportation. 

Too many events happened for me to chronologically take you through my trip, so I think I would prefer to just briefly muse about the major observations and lessons I learned from the traveling experience.

I am in the process of learning to enjoy hanging out with myself. This is a challenge because my personality is such that I am inclined to avoid being alone the majority of the time. I suffer from a fear of missing out and gnawing loneliness too often, but on this trip I spent a lot of time with just my thoughts in my brain bouncing around and learned that it’s not so bad. I don’t think my personality changed or will change any time soon, but I think being happy alone is a behavior I can learn through practice. This was actually a large goal for me on this whole study-abroad adventure, so I am thankful that my spring break allowed me to practice being independent. Specific highlights of my trip that are examples of this movement towards personal dependence:

• Barcelona Beer Festival: I enjoyed walking around this beautiful nirvana of yeast, barley, hops, and hipsters and observing people immensely. It is so fascinating to imagine what brings people from all over the world to a beer festival in Barcelona. 
• Prado Museum in Madrid: I felt as though I got to interact with the characters inside the paintings as I slowly made my way through this gigantic and extremely famous art museum. Spending time at an art museum alone feels like swimming in an ocean; at first overwhelming until I realize that I can float and passively soak up the sun and vitamin D!
• Park Guell: climbing approximately 9.39 million flights of stairs and exploring this wonderfully artistic sanctuary made me feel sort of invisible, but in a cool ninja-like way. 
• Botannical Gardens in Madrid: I took one of the nicest naps of my life on bench next to a picturesque flowerbed of red roses. A nap I will always remember!
• Buen Retiro Park in Madrid: I spent a blissful period of time basking in the sun, listening to the trickle of a little waterfall and the melancholy melodies of a solo trumpeter while drinking in the sun that was as refreshing as a cool glass of sangria.
• Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona: The most colorful cathedral I could imagine. I had a minor spiritual experience as my brain was so completely taken aback by the beauty of the light and colors. I felt closer to God than I have in a significant amount of time. 

I had so many other wonderful experiences and learned so many lessons on this trip. I imagine I will continue to realize what I learned far into the future.

Soccer, Surgeries, and Spring Break

The past couple of weeks have been extremely crazy... We watched the Leverkusen vs. Freiburg soccer game the weekend before we left for spring break and it was so much fun! It definitely made me like soccer more and I'm glad we got to experience that. But even more exciting: I watched a total thyroidectomy! I  learned that the smell of burning flesh is highly unpleasant the hard way.The surgeon let me hold the right lobe and showed me nerves, blood vessels, and other things while the patient was still on the table. It was such an amazing first surgery and I learned so much!

After a week of tests and projects, we finally started spring break in Rome! It ended up being pretty anticlimactic when we spent the first night hunting down police stations after a little pickpocketing incident. The worst part is that we spent an hour trying to find one when there was one just down the street from us (who puts a police station in a secluded corner next to the highway?!). The highlights of Rome were hearing Pope Francis speak about Women's Day, watching a part of the new James Bond movie being filmed in Trastevere, and roaming around Rome (hehe) with Ana and Hazel! We saw so many amazing things like St. Peter's Basilica (and the view from the top of the dome), the Colosseum and a few of the seven hills of Rome, the chariot racing arena (which is just a stretch of dirt now), the Vatican museums (which are cray), and sooooo many basilicas. We entered every church and just stood there in awe. Every church was different and so beautiful in its own way. We also saw a few of the catacombs! Specifically, the ones that Popes used to be buried in before they were moved to the Vatican Grottoes and where Saint Cecilia is buried. Seeing them was probably the coolest thing on this trip and it was so interesting to learn about Roman burial practices. The craziest part was that no matter where you went, you would see ruins. There was history literally everywhere and being in the middle of it was breathtaking/humbling/awesome. In a sentence: Rome was beautiful, filled with so much history, and required way more walking than my feet could survive.

Barcelona was so different from any city we've seen on this trip. I loved it. It's definitely my favourite city and I hope so much that I get the chance to go back one day. We relaxed a lot and cooked dinner together after spending our days out walking around the city. We saw all the Gaudi things: Park Guell, Sagrada Familia, La Pedrera, and Casa Batllo. the Sagrada Familia was WOW. W O W. It's insane how much thought Gaudi put into every last detail and how even after his death, every addition has made it so much more beautiful. The stained glass is amazing and the light at 4:30 pm (thank you tour guide) struck the windows in a way that lit up the entire church. It's so stunning and so completely different from any other basilica we saw in Rome. It will be completed in 2026 and we joked (or was it serious?) that we would come back for its opening as our Biosciences 2015 reunion. No lie, I would definitely go back for that. We also went to the Picasso museum and it really changed my view on art. Seeing his progression from his early works to his pretty crazy later works was interesting and the collection from his work on Las Meninas was so cool. It showed how he practiced every part of the painting in different styles until he understood what he wanted. Just viewing his life through his art was so completely different and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the last things we did in Barcelona was go up Montjuic to the castle on top. We saw an amazing view of the city (even the clouds and rain approaching us) and learned a little about its history, which I didn't know much about. My favourite part of the city was just everything around us. I loved the street music that was everywhere, the hordes of people skateboarding, the dancers practicing in front of the Arc de Triomf, the beautiful parks, and the way people lived around us. I really wish we could have spent more time there - five days was not even close to enough.

All in all, spring break was insane. I'm never going to forget it and I will probably never be able to top wandering through the ruins of Ancient Rome or enjoying the musical and artistic culture of Barcelona. 

Spring Break Part 1-Lisbon

I'm going to split up my spring break trip into 3 parts because otherwise the blog would be incredibly long and I want to be thorough in the things I write, for both my adoring blog fans and myself.

We began our spring break adventure flying from Brussels to Lisbon on Friday morning, arriving in Lisbon in the early evening.  We took a cab to our airbnb apartment which was right in the middle of the pretty part of town.  Our host was actually from New York, and she was a very artsy-looking lady who kept a lot of unique paintings around the flat, all of which depicted boobs in one way or another.

The following morning, we began by wandering around the weekly Lisbon flea market.  It contained a healthy mixture of people selling cool things they created and other people selling all the random trash they wanted to get rid of.  We had brunch outside a nice little cafe, then walked to the Castelo de Sao Jorge.  The castle was pretty cool, offering really nice views of the city and semi-wild peacocks and stray cats.  Next, we walked down to the main plaza of Lisbon and observed all the people-tourists, beggars, guitar players, weird guys feeding the seagulls.  Also, it was here that I believe I began to develop the sunburn I maintained for the rest of the week.  We walked around a bit more and drank some tasty sangria before heading towards the aquarium in the more corporate end of the city.  The aquarium had a "one ocean" theme, so it was basically a ring with one giant tank in the middle, with smaller tanks on the sides.  I enjoyed the aquarium, but I would've liked it more if there weren't so many kids running around....damn youths.  After the seeing the fish, we explored the city some more, happening upon a 50+ person dance circle outside the mall, very cultural.  We then got some dinner and wrapped up the day.

Sunday began with a trip to the Jeronimos Monastery, a beautiful monastery very near to the coast.  Its prime location and pretty architecture made me seriously consider becoming a monk, but using good judgement I decided against it.  We ate lunch at a nice little restaurant with a super friendly waiter and then continued our day at the Berardo Collection Museum.  I will go into some more details of this modern art museum because it was quite an experience.  The Berardo Collection is actually a private collection, and the museum was completely free.  We started with the top floor, which was typical contemporary art pieces spanning several decades.  The real fun began on the bottom floor.  One of the museum's most highly-advertised pieces was an exhibit called "The Clock."  "The Clock" is a 24 hour movie being played on loop in a dark theater with comfy Ikea couches.  I began watching "The Clock," and saw that it is actually short segments of many, many movies put together where the scene from the movie features a picture of a watch or a character talking about the time.  The cool part, though, is that when the real time is 3:06 in the afternoon, "The Clock" will be playing movie scenes where the characters are talking about 3:06 in the afternoon.  It took a little while for me to realize this, but once I did it was mesmerizing to watch the exhibit.  I can't imagine the amount of time it took for the artist to compile all the hundreds, even thousands of movie scenes into one 24 hour video, but the result was most definitely very cool to see.

The next most interesting part of the Berardo Collection was a kind of art called "traumatic realism."  There were about seven or eight different pieces in this room, all of which were highly disturbing.  Lots of images of hanging/nooses, a weird looped video of a naked old woman rolling around on the floor, and this incredibly strange piece with a video-projected head that cussed at and insulted you.  To be honest, I had not been so fundamentally disturbed in a very long time until I entered the traumatic realism room, so I guess the artists accomplished what they were going for.  It was certainly an experience I won't forget.

With our emotions thoroughly rattled by the cussing artwork, we headed out of the museum to see more Lisbon things.  We stopped by the massive Monument to the Discoveries and took an elevator to the top to get a pretty nice view of Lisbon and the Atlantic Ocean.  We walked further down the coast to the Belem Tower and unfortunately did not enter the tower but rather enjoyed the view from the outside.  Next we waited in line at a famous bakery to eat a famous pastry that I can't remember the name of, but it was basically a sweet, cheesy mini-quiche pie.  We ended our trip to Lisbon by returning to our apartment in one of Lisbon's adorable old trams.

I had a fantastic time in Lisbon, and I have to say that it is probably the most beautiful city I have seen in Europe so far.  The food was kind of expensive, but for the most part it was worth it.  I have every intention of returning to Portugal one day to see the rest of the country.

To Home and Back...When it rains it pours and in my life that seems to be a Category 5 Hurricane kind of rain...

I'm so behind on blogging. Things have been a bit hectic and the bad news from home doesn't seem to stop. My cousin passed away last week. She was killed in a car accident due to icy roads. She was a hospice nurse who was out getting medication for one of her patients. Ruthie and I were close. All three of her daughters were at her pinning when she became an RN and she was a lot of my inspiration and was one of the people who pushed me to begin and keep going with my college education. She was also one that was actually pushing me to be here. One of our last conversations she said I was going to come to Germany and when I came home I was going to tell her all about it...

So thankfully Dr. Wasser was okay with, and my Aunt Lorie was able to get me home for the weekend. I flew home on Friday and back on Sunday, arriving back on Monday morning. Friday the roads were pretty bad in Texas.

 But the snow was beautiful to see.

Due to icy roads Ruthie's services were moved...to Sunday afternoon so I still didn't get to attend services BUT I did get to spend several hours with her parents and her daughters, which is way more time that I would have got to spend with them at the funeral. It really meant a lot to my family that I took the time to fly home and be there with them.

It was also very healing for me...Not just to see my aunt, uncle and her daughters, but to see my family. Especially since his heart attack my husband has told me he is okay, but he's always been good at saying things just to make me feel better. It really helped to see that he really is okay. So the time at home wasn't enough to get comfortable or to see everyone I would have liked to but it was really what I needed.

The morning of my flight back to Germany my youngest woke up sick, with what appeared to be a stomach bug. I actually found out once I landed in Frankfurt it was his appendix, not just a stomach bug. Sometimes I wonder if maybe we have past lives and I truly wronged someone in a past life as the bad luck doesn't seem to stop lately. Luckily kiddo's surgery was just as routine as any other appendectomy and he's back to his usual bouncy self.

And one more thing...I've recently found out that my father had blood work that indicates a possible issue with his prostate. His doctor said maybe just a minor infection as the numbers were only slightly abnormal. However, the specialist is running more tests. My mother says the doctor has not directly indicated what he is looking for, but part of me things she's just not telling me. Right now I'm hoping that his doctor was right and it is just minor because unfortunately I have just enough stupid knowledge to know what the possibilities could be and I just can't handle that right now...

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.

Leverkusen!

Leverkusen 1- 0

The most exciting thing that occurred this week was attending the Leverkusen vs Freiburg soccer match! Kristin (study abroad cordinator) managed to get us really good seats. We were all sitting on the first deck with a perfect view of the game. Fans did not stop cheering and chanting! The stadium roared with cheers of excitement...

    I found it interesting how we had to pre-load a card with money to buy food, which was surprisingly delicious and reasonably priced. I bought a scarf with the teams logo, which helped me keep warm after the second half of the game. Leverkusen played outstanding and left the score 1-0. Once the game was over I was a little nervous about how the fans from the other team would react to the loss, but surprisingly everyone seemed to be very cordial and simply headed home.... I'm sure they weren't happy to have lost but at least there was no obvious tension. After the game we headed back to Bonn and I celebrated with a couple of friends by eating pizza:)

 

STUDY abroad

This past week was very long. I had two tests, and I didn't do well on either one of them which is not something I enjoy. Back in College Station, I would usually be ready for the tests a few days in advance, however with all of the traveling/activities we are doing here I was studying almost up to the minute for both Physiology and Differential Equations, not coming home until late every night and getting up early. This experience was not that fun so I am resolved to start preparing sooner because after all this isn't just an abroad trip.

The device design project is going pretty well; my group has a pretty solid idea and we are preparing for the short presentation next week. This week was also my most "athletic" week in Germany. I played soccer, basketball, and ran a couple of miles (and surprisingly survived) to start preparing for the Bonn Marathon in April. Also as a program we went to watch a Bundesliga game!!

On Saturday, we took a train and went to the BayArena to watch Bayer Leverkusen play Freiburg. The atmosphere in the stadium was awesome, with the opposing fans coming together to scream chants and songs for their teams. Our seats were also great (3rd row) which made it that much more memorable.

I am super excited about visiting the Uniklinik on Monday to see some orthopedic surgeries. After that the only things standing in my way to spring break are a signals test and device design presentation!