The End of an Era

The Berlin wall officially came down on November 9, 1989, when the East German government announced that its citizens were allowed to visit West Berlin and the rest of West Germany, ending the almost 30 year cessation of emigration from the German Democratic Republic during the Cold War. Both East and West Germans celebrated, and “mauerspechte” rapidly began to peck away at the wall, creating new unofficial border crossings, while more official crossings were built until the middle of the following year. By July 1, 1990, the inter-German border was essentially meaningless, and border patrols had stopped. On October 3^rd, German reunification was officially completed, and the divided Germany of the Cold War era ceased to exist.

Although most of the Berlin Wall has been chipped into souvenir-sized pieces, sections are displayed throughout Berlin, decorated with symbols of each one’s place of residence, and a roughly 80-meter-long piece still stands in place near Checkpoint Charlie. I was privileged enough to see this chunk of history, along with many other awe-inspiring relics of Berlin’s past, throughout my last week spent in Germany.

The first day there, I was thrown right into the bustle of Berlin with an incredible bike tour of the monuments, palaces, synagogues, cathedrals, and just plain buildings that showed the darker history of the city through their WWII bullet holes. From the huge memorial for the Jewish lives lost to the plaque honoring the T4 victims, it was evident that history is not hidden in Berlin.

My immersement in the culture of Berlin continued with visits to the Bundestag, home of the German Parliament, and Sachsenhausen, a WWII prototype concentration camp. On the medical side of the excursions, a visit to the Charité was first on the list. I got to experiment with some of the interactive teaching tools at the medical school, and the tour of the history museum was terrific to say the least. The trips to the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Biology and the Otto Bock Center, dedicated to the research of prostheses, were also indescribably awesome.

Thursday, my penultimate day in Germany, was spent in Dresden where history and medicine were mixed together with visits to the Dresden Military History Museum and the Deutsches Hygeine Museum Dresden as well as the fantastic tour of the smaller city, led by the cheerful, considerate, and incredibly knowledgeable Dresden native, Cosima.

After the farewell dinner Friday night, I was loathe to leave the amazing city of Berlin, not to mention Germany and Europe as a whole. Unfortunately, however, my time abroad had come to a close as my flight left the following morning. It certainly felt like my own little snippet of time spent living life fully in Germany had ended, and, unlike Berliners in 1989, I was sorry to see the end of an era.

~Daily Blogs Posted Below Break~

Monday, August 6, 2012

Today began bright and early because I had to be at the hauptbahnhof by seven to leave Bonn for Berlin. I got ready to go and then handed over my key to the house and gave my host mom a hug goodbye. I’ll truly miss my host family; they were wonderful hosts and very caring. If I ever make it back to Germany, I’m definitely going to contact them to reunite.

I made it to the train station with all my stuff (I may have had to ring the bell to get back in the house to grab my jacket…) in time for the almost five-hour ride to the Berlin hauptbahnhof. Thankfully, it was an ICE train and we (Alexis, Mario, Michelle, Morgan, Olivia, Dr. Wasser, and I) had seats at the tables so we could work on our blogs or get some more rest relatively easily. We even watched the canyoning video to keep Olivia entertained.

We finally made it to Berlin a little late, but took the first tram just fine. Unfortunately, the second tram we needed to take wasn’t running due to construction on the tracks. So, we dragged all our luggage to the other side of the tram station where the busses stopped and took one as close as we could to Hotel Alex.

We checked in and found our rooms (two floors up with no elevator and us with tons of baggage), freshening up a little before heading out to lunch at an Italian restaurant just down the street. The food was delicious, but our waitress didn’t speak English, so I got to use some of my German phrases in a real situation for the first time which was pretty cool.

We made it back from lunch just in time to meet the rest of the group, everyone had arrived from Switzerland by this point, for our bike tour through the city. We took a bus again, but this time it was the bus that’s running in place of the tram that’s not running.

The bike tour itself was very enjoyable. Our guide was very knowledgeable; he kept rattling off dates of historical significance, like the 9^th of November of various years. He also used his iPad to show us pictures of what the area in which we were standing looked like pre-WWII, during the war, or immediately post-war. We saw many interesting and important buildings, like the house of the German Parliament, university buildings, palaces, cathedrals, and synagogues, even part of the Berlin wall and memorials for those who died in WWII, but the most amazing thing to me was two mirrored buildings across an alley. One had been refurbished but the other hadn’t, and you could see the holes in the walls caused by bullets fired over 60 years ago. That, to me, was just incredible, and it really hit me that I was standing in a place where war had been waged not that long ago at all.

After the awesome tour, we, minus Dr. Wasser and Olivia and Sara who went to try to replace Sarah’s camera, went for dinner in Alexanderplatz at a group of stands called Alex’s. After devouring brawtwurst or currywurst, we headed back towards the hotel, stopping for gelato, and reaching the bus stop. Unfortunately we got there with 14 minutes until the next bus, so I decided to walk, and the others surprisingly followed. I was able to prove my map-reading skills when we successfully made it back to the hotel without a problem.

We all went up to our rooms then, to work on our blogs, contact our families, use the internet, and watch the Olympics before hitting the sack early; we do have to be leaving the hotel by 8 tomorrow morning to make it to the Parliament on time.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Today began with a bit of a rush to get ready, but we still made it downstairs in time to enjoy breakfast. The fruit and yogurt was great together with the musli. After running back upstairs to grab jackets once we realized how chilly it’d gotten over night, we headed out to the bus to get to the German parliament building, the Bundestag.

We had to check in with our passports and pass through security like the airport before we were even allowed to enter the building itself, but it was worth it. We were given an excellent tour of the building by Katja, who went over much of the history of the building and the government. We got to see parts of the limestone walls, covered in graffiti from when the Soviets invaded the city, that were actually parts of the current wall. We also go to sit in the balconies above where the parliament actually sits to discuss matters of the state. This room is right below the coolest modern architecture we’ve seen so far—a dome open to the elements with a mirror-plated funnel in the middle that brings cool air up and prevents rain and snow from getting everywhere inside. We actually got to go up in said dome and walk up a ramp that spiraled around to the top, giving us a panoramic view of Berlin and protecting us from the fierce wind out on the lower flat part of the roof.

We left the Bundestag and walked back towards the city center, passing by a plaque on the wall of a building, stating it was the location where Robert Koch lectured about his discovery of the vector of tuberculosis. Once we were back at the tram station, Olivia set us free to walk around, shop, and eat lunch for almost three hours before we had to meet back at the station to take the tram to Sachsenhausen.

The tram ride was actually pretty long because it took us outside Berlin to Oranienburg, Brandenburg, from where we took a bus out to the concentration camp. We met our guide Sion (pronounced “Shawn”), a native Welsh speaker, on the tram, and he led us through the switch, only a little bit worried when the bus was a few minutes late.

The visit to the concentration camp itself was surreal and pretty much indescribable. It was absolutely amazing to be walking on the same ground as thousands of prisoners, seeing the same words “Arbeit macht frei” (work will set you free) on the entrance gate. Sion showed us all around the reconstructed buildings including the Jewish barracks and their cramped quarters, the prison for special inmates, the extermination facilities at Station Z, the infirmary barracks where various grotesque human experiments were performed, and the mortuary where the bodies of the deceased would be desecrated as they were searched for gold teeth or examined so an ‘appropriate’ cause of death could be chosen from the set list of natural causes. There were also many exhibits within the buildings elaborating on the history that, unfortunately, we didn’t have time to read, but Sion summarized most of the information quite well.

After a rushed walk back from the camp to the bus stop, we ended up waiting for the bus, but we did get to see the bus stop cat, so I didn’t mind. It was nice to see some free life after concentrating on confinement and death for so long.

We made the trip back to Berlin by bus and tram, saying bye to Sion along the way, and left Olivia and Dr. Wasser for the day to go eat dinner a Vapiano’s. The food was great, and afterwards we were able to navigate our way back to the hotel via the bus this time, even if we all had to sprint the last 100 meters to the stop so we didn’t left behind. We rested, wrote, watched the Olympics, and uploaded pictures to Facebook back at the hotel until most of the group went out again to find a bar, which apparently took much longer than it should have. I stayed at the hotel and got a little bit of work done before getting to bed at a decent hour.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Today there was no rush to get ready, mainly because we had an extra hour to sleep. Unfortunately, this meant the breakfast area was extremely crowded, and we all had to squeeze into a little corner to eat. The food still tasted great, though, and not all of our group ate at the same time, so it was OK.

 The first excursion on our schedule today was to visit the Charité. We started out with Kathi, a medical student and tutor at the school there, and she gave us a short lecture on the German medical school system and what her tutoring program is about. She told us about the three different med school curricula taught in Germany: one where preclinical knowledge is taught, students are examined, clinical knowledge is gained, and another final exam takes place; another where preclinical and clinical training takes place at the same in subject blocks followed by course exams and the same overall exam at the end of the six years; and a third like the second, but with more emphasis on preclinical studies at the beginning.

After the lecture, Kathi let us use some of the teaching tools provided by the university, including models of breasts for cancer examinations, a model of the brain with all the cranial nerves marked, an electronic model of a human torso that she could program to have different heart or lung defects that we could listen to with  a stethoscope, a weight suit and blurred or blacked out glasses used to simulate old age, and shock gloves that cause muscle spasms similar to old age tremors that we all got to wear. It’s much harder to write your name when your entire arm is twitching.

We left Kathi a little after noon to walk to a quick lunch before we had to meet back for our tour of the Charité history of medicine museum dedicated to Rudolf Virchows. We split into groups for lunch, and I ended up having Italian (for the 3^rd time in two days), which was great except for the two bees that wouldn’t leave us alone.

After lunch, we did have to do a bit of rushing to meet back with the group, be we made it on-time to the museum, so all was well. We were given a tour of the museum by Tom, who made it very exciting because he would always tell the history like an anecdotal story and kept the tour lively and up-beat. We saw their collection of stones, primarily gall stones, that was started in the early 1700s. They also had many moulages of diseases of the face and eyes along with a large collection of wet and dry specimens of healthy and diseased individuals that was incredibly awesome.

When we’d looked around a little, Olivia sprung on us the news that Dr. Wasser was going to give us our oral exams before the scheduled lectures inside the museum. After that panic pretty much set in and we all grabbed our study materials as fast as possible to review as much as possible before it was our turn. In reality, the exams themselves were not nearly as bad as we were expecting, and I actually liked talking with Dr. Wasser one on one about some of the many amazing things we’ve experienced over the past 5 weeks.

We split the exams five and five before and after Dr. Wasser’s lectures, and I was very glad I went in the first group so I could concentrate on the new material without stressing about remembering everything else. 

In the lectures we quickly covered the Nuremburg Doctors’ Trial that took place following WWII wherein Nazi physicians were tried for their crimes, mainly unethical human experimentation. However, proving what was unethical proved difficult because there were no international guidelines that would cover a situation like that where the mostly German defendants were prosecuted and judged by Americans. During the course of the trial, guidelines were drawn up to specify in which situations human experimentation would be ethical, but they’re not binding laws. Seven of the 23 defendants were sentenced to death, though, and most of the others served 10 to 20 years in prison.

As a side note, the first slide of Dr. Wasser’s lecture included a large picture of the Nazi flag, and since the projector was left on while the first round of oral exams was conducted, the image was burned onto the lens of the projector, so that for the rest of the lecture, there was the outline of a swastika visible on all the slides.

The second lecture was about the man in whose honor the Carité exists—Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchows. 

We learned much about his life, studies, and teachings, and how he, when requested to investigate a typhus outbreak, came back with suggestions for reform in politics, economics, agriculture, and other social values when he determined the sickness was due to the squalor in which those who were infected were living.

After the lectures were finished, the other five people sat their exams while the rest of us either walked around the exhibits some more, or just sat and talked. Once everyone was done, we headed back to Alexanderplatz, hoping to find some crepes as well as real dinner for those of us who didn’t have left over pizza from lunch. We never did find a decent place that served crepes, but Meredith, Caleb, Morgan, Jooy, Sarah, Olivia, and I ate dinner at the Mediterranean restaurant right next to the hotel. There I had the best chicken I’ve had in Europe as well as rice and some awesome sauces.

When we finished dinner, we went back to the hotel to change and get ready to go out for karaoke with Olivia and some of her friends. We went to a place that Kathi had recommended this morning, and that turned out to be pretty good. We actually had our own little room (the public hall was booked), which turned out to be great because we could sing whichever songs we wanted and didn’t have to wait for other people.

After many songs and much fun, we headed back to the hotel for some sleep before our trip to Dresden in the morning.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Today started with breakfast again at the hotel and then we rode the tram (it’s working again!) to Alexanderplatz, then the bus to the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. We had a little time at the train station to get sandwiches to keep for lunch later, and then we took a train to Dresden. We actually had cabins again on this train, so most of us spent the around two hour ride catching up on sleep in the semi-private rooms.

We arrived in Dresden around 11 in the clean and open bahnhof where we had a few minutes to grab some snacks and look around at the souvenir shop and the display of an artist’s train sketches. Once Olivia had our public transport passes, we took the tram to the Dresden military history museum where we were guided by Marie.

The building of the museum is part old and part new, with the new part being a wedge-shaped protrusion, a piercing symbol of war. The wedge points to the site where bombs fell on Dresden near the end of WWII, and the shape is like that of the part of the city that was destroyed. Within the wedge, the angles of the walls to the ceiling are never 90 degrees, and the floor on the top level is tilted, another symbol this time forcing you to find balance.

The museum was split into two basic parts: the old section housed the traditional chronological military history, including displays of technology and style during WWI directly across from the showcases of objects used for the same purposes from WWII so you could compare how much or little the war tech developed.

The wedge of the building had many different exhibits, including large objects, like a V2 rocket and a helicopter, shown in large vertical that were perfectly matched in size. There was also a corner painted with a special material that, when a bright light flashed, would keep the shadows of whatever was between the light and the paint for a few seconds. This is meant to be similar to how when the atomic bombs were dropped in Japan in WWII the explosions’ flashed left similar outlines of the humans present. In our case, though, we lived through the flash.

There was also a display of taxidermy animals that were (and are) used by various military groups to help the war efforts. For example, they had a horse and mule (and elephant and camel) that can carry soldiers and packs, a search and rescue dog, a lion used for imposing photographs, a sheep used as a mine detector, a carrier/reconnaissance pigeon, an anti-tank dog trained to crawl under enemy tanks with a bomb strapped to its back, a cat used for gas warfare experiments as well as an early gas detection system, and more.

Another exhibit displayed hundreds of children’s toys based on war, like toy soldiers, sticks used as swords or guns, toy guns, and even a Darth Vader costume. During war time, these toys were very popular, but parents often had moral debates about whether it was alright for their children to be pretending to kill while actual killing was occurring elsewhere.

When we were done at the military history museum, we ate our sandwiches on the move and took the tram over to the Deutsches Hygeine Museum Dresden where we were our own tour guides. We split up into groups of two (I was with Morgan) and were each given a room in the permanent exhibit hall to look through and then give a short presentation about. Morgan and I had eating and drinking, and there were many displays around the room, including an endoscope video, a screen that played an animation of the human body as a machine and showing motors, gears, and tiny people working all the body systems, many models of the digestive system, liver, and kidneys, a dentistry set up from the early 1900s, depictions of the food industry, a life-size see-through model of a cow so you could see all its internal organs, stations revealing how all the senses are involved in consumption, and a set-up that compared CO₂ emissions from the production of organically versus traditionally grown/produced foods.

Each of the other four exhibits was incredibly fascinating as well. There were rooms on life and death, sexuality, learning and memory, and motion. Most of these rooms had more physically interactive rooms, like a ladder-like apparatus that you climbed into to simulate how hard it is to stand straight in old age, a heat-sensitive camera intended to show how blood flow to the face increases when kissing, a “brain ball” that would move when the attached computer/EEG-type thing detected delta waves (showing you’re relaxed), and a balance beam in the motion room. We all had a lot of fun investigating our rooms and giving our tours, but I know I wish we’d been able to understand the German placards telling us what each exhibit was really about.

After we finished at the museum, we were given a fantastic tour of the city by Cosima. She led us all around the famous landmark and churches, like the Lutheran church that looks more Catholic Baroque style than the Catholic church, and the Procession of Princes, a mural on a wall that consists of 25,000 porcelain tiles. She knew we’d had a long day, so she gave us every opportunity to sit while she discussed the history of our surroundings, showing pictures taken pre- and post-WWII. She even let us stop for some delicious ice cream made with real chocolate (the white chocolate one was amazing). It was really awesome to be shown around by Cosima because she is a native of Dresden, and was active in many of the more recent political movements. We could tell she really loved her city, and it made the tour all the better.

Cosima perfectly timed the end of the tour in the palace square so we could see and hear the bells on the tower play a tune, which only happens three times a day. Then she took us to the tram station so we could get back to the hauptbahnhof and said farewell.

When we got to the train station, we found out our train had a 60-minute delay, so we decided to eat dinner in Dresden rather than waiting until we got back to Berlin. We split off into groups, and my group decided to eat at a street stand serving German food. Most of us wanted something German to eat because it was our last dinner on our own in Germany (how’d that happen!?!). I was a little skeptical about eating food off the street, but my schnitzel and fries were awesome (and only €4,30). Since we got our food and ate quickly, we still had plenty of time to walk around the strip of shops near the station. I ended up just going back to the gift shop at the hauptbahnhof and getting a Saxony t-shirt and an entire liter of apfelschorle.

We all made it to the train platform with plenty of time to spare, so Olivia discussed our departure details with us for the day after tomorrow. The train finally showed up, and we got situated (after kicking some people out of our reserved seats; I felt kind of bad about that) for the 2 hour trip back to Berlin. It turned out that the people who were in our seats were Swiss, and even Olivia couldn’t understand their Swiss-German.

Eventually we arrived back at Hotel Alex and, even though the others in the group had plans to go out, we were too tired to do anything but collapse in our beds.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Today dawned our last day in Berlin, our last day in Germany, and our last day of the study abroad program. Every once and a while I would remember it was my last time doing something, but we had such a full day, I didn’t really think about it too much.

After breakfast at Hotel Alex, we took multiple trams and a bus to the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Biology and were given a couple of interesting lectures by the public relations person and one of the researchers. The first talked about the goals of and general information about the center, and the second gave us some more specific information about chemical biology. We learned that chemistry and biology are both interrelated, and that many of the biological advancements would not have been possible without the previous development of chemical methods. He also pointed out how engineering and technical advancements with computers have made the life of a molecular researcher much easier.  He then gave us a tour of some of the molecular studies labs where they had many expensive automated robotic pipetting machines.

We then walked to another part of the center where we got to see a couple of MRI machines and learned some about how they worked. We first saw a smaller MRI used for imaging lab mice and rats that showed about 10 times the detail of standard MRIs in order to visualize the smaller structures of the animals. We had to clean our shoes when we entered the room, because the mice were just through the next door and we didn’t want to bring in any contaminants to them. The MRI technician showed us some MRI images of fruits and showed us how strong the magnetic field is by placing a non-magnetic plate that normally wouldn’t stand, near the machine and it was held up.

Then we saw the € 7 million 7 Tesla MRI around which the building was built. This one is large enough for humans and incredibly powerful. The MRI technician telling us about the MRI held a  metal-filled tennis ball on a string near the machine and it was only attracted to the center of the machine’s magnetic field when it was within two meters, showing how the technology to contain the field has improved. He also showed us MRI images where the water (hydrogen ions) show up white on the normal density-weighted images as well as movement weighted images that show (what do you know) movement, but relative movement so you can see, after some processing, how, for example, the blood is flowing through the aorta, whether laminar or turbulent, to help diagnose structural problems within the heart.

We ate a nice lunch at the center’s cafeteria (what is it with German cafeteria food being good?) and then headed to the Otto Bock Center. There we were given a tour by Karolin of the interactive museum where we were able to touch almost everything, like a real leg prosthesis, multiple wheel chairs, and many computer interfaces. There was also a room where images were projected onto a table and you could touch them like a touch screen computer. There was also a part of that section where you could lay your arm and have images of the bones, muscles, and connective tissues of your arm projected onto it.

After an awesome time at Otto Bock, we had some free time to visit the souvenir shops (or other stores) before heading back to the hotel to get ready for the farewell dinner. We were all ready only a little after our scheduled time, and we went down to the hotel lobby to fill out the AIB evaluations of the program. I think it was five pages front and back, listing pretty much every place we’ve been and asking us how all the excursions went. It was amazing to see all we’d done listed out, and it was kind of hard to remember all the details from the early days of our trip. It made me very grateful that I’ve done daily blogs so I can look back and really remember.

For dinner, Dr. Wasser took us to a lovely Moroccan restaurant where we ate delicious Moroccan food, like couscous, after having our hands washed in rose water. It was blissful. We stayed at the restaurant, taking our time enjoying the food and the atmosphere for hours, until midnight when the waiter brought out a desert with sparklers for Mario to celebrate his birthday. We, as a group, also gave Olivia and Dr. Wasser their gifts of Swiss chocolates and drinks. Olivia was very sweet and gave each of us a picture of the group and a buddy bear penny with a personal note written on the back. It was sad to know this would be our last dinner together as a group, and we all reminisced and shared a few tears and many laughs.

We finally left the restaurant and took one last group picture before heading back to Alexanderplatz where some of the group split off to celebrate Mario’s birthday, planning to stay up the whole night, while Alexis and I went back to the hotel to finish packing and get a little rest before all of our early departures in the morning. 

Saturday, August 11, 2012

My final daily blog will undoubtedly be my shortest because although today was 31 hours long for all of us heading home, most of my time was spent sitting on a plane, although, I was just grateful to make it to my flight on time after Morgan, Michelle, and I woke up late and had to rush. We made it just fine, though (the 2-hour delay of their flight may have helped…) and split up after a final good-bye to find our separate terminals. As a side note, each of the terminals at the Berlin airport had its own security check point rather than the general one I’m used to at Bush Intercontinental. I got checked in and through security quickly, though, and got to relax a little before boarding my first short flight to Frankfurt.

We landed less than an hour after departing, and the terminal for my flight home was easy enough to find; I even had some time to look around the airport shops and buy some snacks for the flight. The boarding process however, was not so enjoyable. We all had to line up to answer security questions (like “do you have a weapon in your bag?”…really?), which took forever, not to mention the fact that apparently Texans can’t understand German’s directions for lining up…

Anyway, we eventually all boarded and the flight took off without a hitch. I was seated next to a lovely woman returning with her family from vacation in Switzerland, and we spent some time chatting. The rest was occupied with the in-flight entertainment (I watched the Avengers and Sherlock Holmes II) as well as plenty of food…almost excessive amounts of food. We had the typical pretzels (plus more) bag, full dinner with side salad, crackers, roll, and little apple pie type thing, two ice cream cups, a hot sandwich with chips and a cookie/brittle thing, and no less than 6 drinks. I really didn’t need to buy the snacks at the airport.

We landed (on time—gasp!) in Houston at six in the evening, which was really one in the morning, but honestly my nap on the plane threw everything off so I had no idea what time it really was. I made it through customs, exchanged some Euros and Crowns, and after many confusing phone calls about terminal names, found my family (well, they found me), and officially ended my trip.