Week 5

Monday we got up and took a train to Berlin for the last week of study abroad! When we got there we all went on a bike tour which was a blast, I wish every walking tour we’ve done had been a bike tour instead! Except right around ten minutes after we started it decided to rain the hardest it had our whole trip. It was pouring! The tour guide kept trying to stop under overhangs to keep us dry but there was no use, we were all soaked to the bone. But the rain was honestly a lot of fun to ride in, and it was hilarious when we stopped to go into a museum; there’s no rule saying you can’t go in if you’re wet but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve changed it since we visited. I was surprised to see how many really pretty buildings there are Berlin, this city is pretty awesome. My favorite place we saw was the Jewish Memorial for the Holocaust. It was a bunch of cement stones that were rectangles rising from the ground at different heights and getting taller the closer to the middle we got. But they were all in a grid, so no matter where I was I could see the outside like I was looking down a tunnel. Walking through, people would seem to dart every which way when they were walking by and it got really eerily quiet. It was really cool and a nice place to think. And of course it was awesome to see the Brandenburg Gate, I had seen it in so many movies and documentaries that to see it right there in front of me was a little unreal. Tuesday we went to Sachsenhausen to see the concentration camp there. We got off the train and walking the same path that the prisoners would have walked which was eery, especially when we got closer to camp and saw how close people had lived to it. Our tour guide was fantastic, probably the best we’ve had and he pointed out that the houses closest to the camp used to be owned by members of the SS and now they are lived in by regular people, I wonder if they know the history of their houses and what they were used for, or maybe they do and just bought it because it was cheap. When we got to the camp it was a little confusing because no one is really sure which parts of it are original and which have been reconstructed. One cabin that had been rebuilt caught fire a while ago due to an arson-attempt by some neo-Nazis. The site left it there, glassed in as a sign that the same prejudice that caused the Holocaust to happen still exists. Afterward we went to get currywurst which I had never tried before but was really good and then we were off to tour the German Parliament building. It was much more interesting than I had expected, There were some soviet style artworks that had been recently added covering a wall. I really like the style, it was kind of cartoony but the point across that in communism it is not about the individual but their role in society. And then there was a part of the building that included bricks from the old building with some graffiti on it that looked really cool. There was a memorial to the new socialistic parliament that was made of a bunch of boxes that look like what you would store photos in stacked up to the ceiling in two rows you could walk between and on each box was the name of a member of the parliament and the years they served. I thought it was odd how Angela Merckel’s box looked roughed up and bent in, because she’s the current chancellor, but then again that’s probably why it was given special attention. We went to the roof of the Parliament building where they have a huge transparent globe that you can walk inside and see a great view of the whole city of Berlin. Wednesday we visited the Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine. We toured their Ultrahigh-Field Magnetic Resonance Facility where they were doing research to develop better MRI’s and other imaging tools and got to go in and play by one of the MRI’s, I could feel the bobby-pins in my hair start to move when I got too close! Then we went on a tour of the ECRC Lab where Adrian Schreiber was doing research on ‘Neutrophil Biology in Health and Disease.’ They were studying a specific disease that affects neutrophils and we were shown one part of their research in particular where they introduced some kind of inducer to neutrophils and observed how they exploded and started to form nets to see if it had any useful application for a treatment. We listened to another researcher talk about her attempts to find a treatment for muscular dystrophy and her English was hard to follow but what I got was that she was looking at a protein that was thought to be involved in repairing muscles and testing its effectiveness. Afterward we ate lunch and then visited the Otto-Bock Science Center! Otto-Bock is one of the leading prosthetic companies in the world. We got to see some of the first developed prosthetics and how they were developed into what they are today. It was incredible to see all of these top-notch prosthetics, I hope that if for some reason I find myself without a limb one day I’m lucky to have access to one of those prosthetics! Afterward we had free time and a few of us went to the East Berlin Art Gallery, definitely one of my favorite things of the whole trip, it’s a section of the Berlin Wall that was painted after the wall fell by artists who had been repressed in East Berlin. In 2009 Berlin got the original artists to come back and re-do their murals. It was incredible, just walking down the wall and seeing mural after mural filled with so much mush passion for freedom both physically and the freedom to express themselves again. Some were filled with anger and frustration and in others there was peace of mind and just happiness to be free. We all tried falafel for dinner which is basically chick peas mashed up and fried into a patty and it was pretty good! Thursday we took a train to Dresden and went on a walking tour. We started the the Frauen Kirche, the Church of the Lady and I’m not sure what architectural style it was but it was absolutely gorgeous, definitely a favorite. The original church actually had a bomb fall right through it’s dome during WWII and destroy most of it. They left it as a memorial for a while and then some people got together and decided to rebuild it. They got like 100 million Euros in donations and if cost over 200 million to build! They tried to save as much of the original stones as possible and put them back in their original place when they rebuilt it. It made for a really cool effect to have a new, fresh church with sections or just random scorched stones from the old church, very old merging with new artsy feel. Going along the tour we saw a lot of really impressive buildings, but oddly the most of them had been recently rebuilt. I had never seen the point of trying so hard to preserve historical buildings in the original state, but knowing they were all mostly new in Dresden made it feel like we were walking around a Dresden Disney Park or something. It was still really pretty and if they hadn’t rebuilt then the city would be practically non-functional. We ate lunch and then Went to the Hygiene Museum which I had been dreading just because it sounded so incredibly boring, but it was awesome!! Apparently Hygiene in old German means science so it was actually a science museum. There was a temporary exhibit on the brain that was unique because it had a lot of artwork associated with the brain but also a lot of factual historical information. It showed how people’s view of how the brain and soul/sub-conscious are connected has changed over the years and as netter imaging techniques have come about. Then we toured the museum and there were so many cool interactive things, my favorite being this machine that let people compete to see who was more ‘chill.’ It basically measured brain activity and a silver ball would roll in the direction of the person whose brain activity was higher, and if the ball reached you then you lost. I lost, big time haha. And then there was an apparatus that consisted of two wires, one that slightly warm and the other slightly cold, that had been twisted together. The thing was actually room temperature but when I touched it, it either felt like my hand was freezing to the point of frost bite or so hot that it was about to melt of, pretty crazy. We were all having so much fun that the museum staff had to kick us out at closing time, oh engineers =]. Friday was the last day of study abroad class! We went the Charite Museum; the Charite is the Medical School of Merlin. The physiology room in the museum was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. There were rows and rows of specimens organized by organ system and then within the subunit they went from healthy to diseased organs and the last case in every row focused on one major medical condition associated with the organ system. I saw hearts that still had LVADs connected and ones that had artificial valves implanted and others that had had a coronary artery bypass, SO COOL. There were some joints that still had joint replacements in them, and then one row was devoted to babies that had died due to different birth defects. It was strange because they had been preserved in fluid and still had skin and everything but still really interesting. We had our last lecture by Dr. Wasser in the museum and then we went to the actual Charite. We got a tour of the Medical School and a short presentation on how the teaching structure is. Because it’s free there, the structure that best suits the teacher is chosen instead of the one that best suits the student as it generally works in America. Walking around we passed a group of first years just getting out of their end of year exams, they looked like babies! I forgot they start Medical School right out of High School so they were all actually two years younger than me! We got to go to one of their skills lab a practice suturing, I absolutely love it. We went to a Moroccan restaurant for a farewell dinner and the food was delicious and full of spices I’ve never tasted before. Afterward we said our goodbye’s to Dr. Wasser and Nils and some of the students that were leaving in the morning, it was really kind of sad! But we’d all see each other again back at school.