After that I bought a new camera at a local department store!
For dinner, Carrie and I ate with our host familly - spaghetti!
After dinner I decided to go for a run. In particular, I needed to get my memory card from someones house for my new camera, so I decided to run there. One problem - I didn't exactly find out where to go before hand. I ended up getting so wonderfully lost in the beautiful streets of Bonn. I ran for an hour before I finally found his house and ended up bumming money to take the bus home.
Tuesday for breakfast, James bought this cereal that is my new favorite - Musli! Basically its cocoa pebbles, oats, and chocolate. Perfect.
We all took a train to Cologne and did a walking city tour. Of course we went to the Dom, but we also hit a few new spots and I learned some interesting things. For one, there is a bridge there where couples will put locks on it to symbolize their love. I think that is a cute idea and maybe something I'll do one day. Next we had lunch at Gaffel Kolsch. I had bratwurst for the first time - not my favorite, but still good.
After that we toured the El-De House. It is a museum and memorial to the Gestapo prison and Nazi era in Cologne. The main exhibit is the house itself, which was the local Gestapo headquarters and prison. Down in the basement you can visit the prison cells where "undesirables" were tortured and killed. The tiny cells were considered over-crowded even by Gestapo standards, with 25-30 people in rooms of only a few square metres. Most poignantly, over 1800 inscriptions from the prisoners kept in the cells have been preserved, ranging from calendars to sketches to written pleas. The visit made the WWII very real for me. Like I mentioned in another post, its one thing to read about history, and its another to be there, reliving it.
After that we had some free time, so a few of us went shopping and had 1 euro ice cream :) The last thing of the day was supposed to be a rooftop tour of the Dom, but unfortunately our guide never showed and we waited too long to go up by ourselves because it closed. I was looking forward to doing that, but we might go back another time.
Wednesday we started off the day very early by going to Bonn University, splitting up into small groups, and seeing surgeries! My group got to see three. The first one was a radial repair. They just made a small incision then used a guide rod to get the right angle for the screw. I was amazed at how much the screw looked like one from a hardware store.
Our second surgery was a biopsy of a young woman's soleus muscle. She had a tumor and they needed to discover if it was cancerous or not. It was interesting because she was awake the whole time, just under spinal anesthesia. They took out a large piece of the tumor and we got to visually compare it to the healthy muscle tissue.
The third surgery would have been a spinal one - the repair of a spinal prolapse, but we ran out of time and had to leave.
The two doctors we worked with were so kind and helpful. They seemed to enjoy talking to us while they were operation, explaining every step. This was probably one of my favorite things so far. It was my first opportunity to view surgeries from the OR and be able to ask questions.
For lunch, another bakery sandwhich. And an Americana - a pastry with icing - in honor of the game that night.
The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to being painted up for the Women's World Cup semifinals - USA vs France! A bunch of us painted our bodies! We definitely got a lot of attention when we were there - cheers, high fives, and probably 200 people took our picture. It was awesome! It was rather cold, though, and raining, but that didn't dampen our American pride! We won!
Thursday our morning consisted of class with Dr. Wasser about the Nazi Euthanasia program. It was deeply disturbing. I never knew about the hundreds of thousands of people that were killed before the war even started - people deemed "unfit for society" and "better off dead" - mentally and physically handicapped, heritable diseases, and any other trait that the authorities deemed destructive to their "master race". One of the most surprising things I heard was how at the time, America had a well established sterilization program to prevent the passing on of some of these same kinds of traits to offspring. Germany wanted to be like us.
Afterward, I had lunch at a bakery and coffee afterward.
Next we had a guest lecture by a homeopathic doctor. Essentially he uses plants to treat patients for various ailments. As students of western medicine, this was a difficult concept to grasp and we asked many questions. The controversial part is that he dilutes the active ingredient so much that it can no longer be considered active. It is said that the aura of the medicine is still present. We discussed the placebo effect also. I don't think I've drawn a complete conclusion on this one yet but I am definitely a skeptic. He gave us a tour of a botanical garden and explained what some of the plants are used to treat.
After that we were free, and the most stressful event of my trip occurred. Our plans to go to Paris the next day exploded in our faces when the train we intended on riding was booked. Its been basically all worked out and as of now, I'm still going! I hope I can get back!
Friday we started off the day by going by bus to the DLR Institute of Aerospace Medicine. Within the DLR the Institute of Aerospace Medicine is the only research institution that primarily deals with life science problems concerning space flight, aviation and traffic. The Institute's research activities are focussed on the central task of providing for the health and performance of the persons involved (pilot, crew, passenger, astronaut, motorist, resident etc.) We got a guided tour of the European Center, including a detailed description and discussion of the International Space Station. It was interesting to hear about how it was assembled, the research done there and the cooperation between countries involved, and even to see the port where the Atlantis will dock on its last space mission. We also got to hear about some of the physiological problems associated with zero gravity and the methods used to overcome them - including not sleeping in corners because air won't move freely and you would literally suffocate on your own carbon dioxide. We also got to see the neutral buoyancy facility (a giant pool).
We had a quick lunch - salami pizza from a local shop.
Next, we visited the Augustusburg Castle in Bruhl. It was beautiful! We weren't allowed to take pictures though. Everything about it was magnificent. The most impressive part was the entry way with the staircase, including the painting on the ceiling - completed in 10 days!
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