We’re on our train to Munich for the weekend and I can’t wait to get there! I’m also really happy that we don’t have to worry about converting money again on this trip because thinking between dollars and Euros and Czech koruna got pretty complicated. I’m a little sad to be leaving Berlin because we’ve had so much fun there over the past week. On Wednesday, we visited the German History Museum and had a tour which ended up being pretty long, but still interesting. Our guide was very good and he knew a LOT of information. He showed us really cool exhibits like one of Napoleon’s hats and propaganda from WWII. My favorite thing that our guide taught us was how to say “Germany” in German sign language which was based on the helmets that the German soldiers used to wear. We then went to the Robert Koch Institute in the afternoon. He seemed like a pretty impressive guy and I really liked seeing his medical tools from way back in the 1800s. It was interesting to see what pieces are the same as modern ones and what has changed.
Yesterday morning we went to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg. Our tour here focused on the medical experimentation that was carried out in this camp, and it was interesting, even if it was pretty sad. I liked how the exhibits were set up in the rooms where the prisoners had lived so that you really got a sense of what they were going through at the time. It was interesting to hear about the different doctors in the camp because it’s really hard to imagine what type of person would be able to act so cruelly towards other human beings and what motivated them to do these things.
After lunch we went to the Charite Museum and had a tour about medical history which was really good. Our guide was really entertaining and he told us some really funny stories. There was also a room at the museum that had a bunch of medical specimens from all parts of the body. The rows of samples were organized by what organ/organ system they featured, and at the end of each row, there were samples that showed abnormal or diseased parts. Some of these were pretty gross, but cool at the same time. My favorite specimen was a cross section of a femur from a patient who had an artificial hip and it showed the metal implant which was anchored into the bone by a screw that was at least four inches long. It always amazes me that doctors can perform this type of procedure on patients and that at one point of time, someone must have thought to himself “I can fix this person if we screw a giant bolt into his leg.”
Today we packed up our bags and took a train out to Duderstadt to see the Otto Bock Facilities. This was one of the parts of the trip that I was most excited about, and it definitely exceeded my expectations. First we had a tour of the floor where they made a bunch of different pieces of the prosthetics. It was really cool to see how they made the C-leg from the carbon sheets. I never would have guessed that the leg wasn’t made like that. I also like the machine that had a row of molds to make a bunch of feet at once.
The one part of the factory that was the most amazing was the area for packaging and shipping. They had a system where all of the workers remained at their own station and they could enter information on a computer and a conveyor belt would bring them the box with whatever piece they needed. It was so cool that the system could keep track of how many parts were in each box and where each box needed to go using those laser barcode scanners. I had a lot of fun watching one place where several conveyor belts intersected because the boxes looked like little cars moving through traffic on their own accord.
The rooms where the boxes were sorted and stored were also amazing. The machine that carried the boxes down the rows and up to the right shelves reminded me of the room in Monsters Inc. where all the doors were sorted. It was also awesome that the program knew which boxes were called for the most throughout the day and it was able to sort them throughout the night to be more efficient the next day. I wish that we had gotten to stay at Otto Bock longer, but now I’m glad to be on our way to Munich and I hope that this weekend will be as much fun as our trip to Prague was last week!
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