Week 5-Part 2

We are about to embark on our final free weekend. I am excited to visit yet another different country.  It has been really neat to experience all different parts of Europe, and Rome is the destination I am most excited about. This week was our last in Bonn, and it was full of activities as usual and flew by very quickly. On Monday we visited the Cologne Zoo. The open exhibit concept of the zoo was really neat. Instead of heavy bars and imposing structures, the zoo uses dry moats and a lot of see through materials to allow the visitors to feel like they are closer to the animals. It gives the zoo more of a safari feel rather than one of looking at prisoners through bars. The highlight of our tour of the zoo was the chance to feed the giraffes. Giraffes are one of my favorite animals and I really enjoyed having the chance to see them up close. My second favorite animals that we visited were the baboons. It was very interesting to watch their social behavior. I also enjoyed our behind the scenes tour of the elephant exhibit. It was incredibly well thought out and built, and reminded me very much of Jurassic Park. I was very impressed by the concept of the command center with cameras and the ability to control various parts of the exhibit from a central location. After the zoo we hunted down a burrito shop that I found out about through a friend in Bonn. The man who owns it is from Texas and graduated from TCU, which gave us high hopes for real burritos. They were amazing. I would highly recommend them to study abroad students looking for a little slice of Texas-it’s called Bay Area Burrito and it’s in Rudolfsplatz in Cologne (you can find it on facebook).

On day two of our last week in Bonn we visited the University clinics. We all had the opportunity to check out different surgeries. First I watched the beginning of a triple bypass surgery. I found this one interesting because we don’t really do any open-heart surgeries on horses. It was amazing to see the human heart in living form, and the way they have to reroute blood from the heart to operate on it. After watching the beginning of that surgery I went to orthopedics to watch a plate removal. Two plates were removed from the femurs of a 16-year-old girl who had had a congenital defect repaired via the plates. It was really neat to see the holes left in the bone and the plates that were removed. We use the exact same types of plates and screws in horses, but our plates are a little longer. I enjoyed watching a comparable surgery to that which I encounter regularly at the large animal hospital at TAMU. I also found the recovery process interesting. I always wondered how recoveries are handled in human medicine, and found that it was a relatively simple process of monitoring by various personnel. I asked the doctor about recoveries and he explained that each patient wakes up differently- some are agitated while others remain calm or various states in between.  This is the case with horses also, but unfortunately we can’t explain to horses that they are in the hospital and are waking up from surgery and so recovering horses after a long procedure can be a complicated and dangerous process. I really enjoyed observing the surgeries at the university clinics and comparing them to the large animal surgery world that I work in. I was surprised at how similar this hospital and the surgery process were to the large animal hospital at TAMU. 

On Wednesday we took a train to Bingen to visit the Hildegard museum. My favorite part of the museum was the ancient Roman surgical instruments. I can’t imagine having undergone surgery in a time where there was no anesthesia or aseptic technique. I also enjoyed the artistic representations of Hildegard ‘s visions. They were very colorful and surprisingly modern; they could easily have been contemporary pieces of abstract art. We also had the opportunity to walk through a garden like the one that Hildegard would have had access to. Some of the medicinal uses of the plants were somewhat comical and some seemed a little gross but some of them actually used active ingredients that we use today, although they didn’t know back then how these remedies worked.  After the Hildegard museum we grabbed a bite to eat and headed down the Rhine via boat. The number of castles we saw was amazing. It seemed like every couple of minutes revealed a castle just around the corner. The castles as well as all the towns along the river were beautiful. We also saw the famous Lorelei rock where legend has it Lorelei would cause ships to crash along the shoreline. To conclude our outing on the Rhine we visited Rheinfels castle. Even from a distance and in its largely ruined state it was an impressive structure. The castle was very powerful in its day due to its impenetrability and the wealth of the owners because of their ability to charge a tax to those traveling along the river. My favorite part of the castle visit was a trip through the mine-shafts. These underground tunnels would allow the soldiers to place explosives in strategic locations when the castle was attacked and allow them to move about unseen. Some of the tunnels we traveled through were so small that we had to almost sit down and shuffle along; they were also pitch black when we turned off all of our flashlights. Besides the tunnels, we checked out one of the dungeons, the slaughterhouse, a huge cellar, and climbed to the top of one of the towers. The castle was a really neat excursion and was one of my favorites of our study abroad so far.

On our final day in Bonn we had class at the AIB for the last time with Dr. Wasser. I was very sad to say goodbye to my host family, but I definitely plan on visiting them when I eventually return to Germany. So long for now, Bonn!