Last Week- Berlin

I couldn’t have picked a better place to spend our last week in Germany. Olivia had said before we left for Berlin that it is a city that you either love or you hate and I definitely loved it. I’ve said it in previous blog posts but due to its intricate history and role during the Nazi period as well as the Cold War, it is a city like no other. Today Berlin is a melting pot of different cultures, views, opinions and stories that is held together by an extremely liberal and accepting attitude.

We started off the week on Monday afternoon with a Fat Tire Bike Tour led by my favorite tour guide we had all trip: Sion. He was incredibly funny, informative and had a great accent. We saw a lot of the city on the tour including the site of Check Point Charlie, a still existing wall guard tower, the Brandenburg Gate and the memorial to the Jews killed during the Nazi period. It was definitely my favorite bike tour of the three that we did during the program. Jessica even liked it so you knew it was good! Afterwards, a group of us that didn’t go to Munich ate at the Hofbrauhaus and ordered the obligatory liter beer that we had missed by not going to Bavaria.

On Tuesday morning we visited the Reichstag, which was really interesting even though our tour guide was rather harsh and dull. In the afternoon we visited the memorial site of the former Concentration Camp in Sachsenhausen. We spent all afternoon learning about the different parts of the camp and hearing stories of what had happened there but by the time we left I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I couldn’t believe the atrocities that had happened on the very ground where I was standing. I was shocked to learn that as Sachsenhausen was the model camp that all other camps were based off of, there were many foreign visitors who came to see how it was run. Journalists, academics, people involved in prisons in their own countries from Australia to the UK made trips to the camp and saw it in action. It was the commandant’s job to make the camp look like a harsh yet humane way of punishing criminals by having them give back to society in the form of working. What these foreigners didn’t know was the fact that to the guards these prisoners were not people but rather disposable details in a well-oiled machine and that many of the prisoners were not in the camp because they were criminals but because they were of a certain race or heritage seen as unfit in the vision of the domination of the Third Reich. As we were leaving I was thinking about how hard of a job it would be to give tours in such a depressing and atrocious place and that’s when Ryan told us about the anniversary for the survivors that they have every year on the day the camp was liberated by Soviet troops. He talked about how over the years the number of survivors that return has dwindled and very soon there won’t be any left. It is important that these stories are remembered and that every generation for the rest of time learns about what happened and hears the horrors so that nothing like the Holocaust ever happens again. So although the trip was emotionally draining and it was uncomfortable to be there. I am glad that we went and can be a part of remembering the victims and making sure humanity doesn’t repeat its mistakes.

The rest of the week continued with long days chock-full of activities. On Wednesday we went to the Charite Learning Center and got to see simulations of a patient with a hear murmur and one with a collapsed lung as well as try our hand at intubation and see what it is like to be elderly and have a tremor by putting on body weights and gloves attached to electrodes. It was interesting to hear about the curriculum from the medical students that were there working with us and I found it hard to believe that they don’t learn the anatomy of the arm until their last semester in school! The system is very different than in America and there are definitely pros and cons to both. Afterwards we went to the Charite museum and saw a lot of really interesting specimens like those we saw in Fools Tower in Vienna. Afterwards we went to the East Side Gallery which is the longest portion of the Berlin Wall still standing and is covered in murals featuring bizarre, colorful and poignant images and words. On Thursday we ventured out of the city and went to Leipzig. There we visited the KHF Kidney Center, the Apotheke museum and did a walking city tour. I didn’t realize that Leipzig was the epicenter of the peaceful revolution that eventually led to the Berlin Wall coming down and the freedom of Eastern Germans. It was really cool to see the church where the prayer services took place and the city where it all began. All of a sudden it was Friday and we had our last program event at the Otto Bock Center. The center focused on mobility and displayed some of the prosthetics that Otto Bock has developed and was full of interactive stations where you could test balance and reaction time, see how a mechanical arm rotates in comparison to a real arm and try out one of the wheelchairs developed by the company. It was a really cool place and I learned a lot about prosthetics that I hadn’t thought of or didn’t know before. After the tour we were basically done. We had the afternoon free to eat, shop and see Dr. Wasser as the “Jew in a box” at the Jewish museum and the program officially came to a close that evening with evaluations and our last group dinner at the Moroccan restaurant, Kasbah. It was very bittersweet to say bye to the country that had been my home for the last 5 weeks and to the people that had become my friends. As I sit on the plane flying back to Texas, I am anxious to try to slip back into everyday life. This experience has been like none other and was more than I imagined it could be. I learned so much about a small part of a big world that I feel so isolated from and ignorant about by living in the US. I also learned a lot about myself, people in general and had the time of my life while doing it all. I know that it isn’t goodbye forever (as we all live within a 10 mile radius of each other back in College Station) but it is the end of an awesome adventure. I am so thankful for the opportunity to study abroad and I know that this wasn’t my last trip. So until next time, Tschüss!!