This past
week we finished our excursion in Vienna. We went to a wax museum at the
medical school. They made wax models of cadavers that they used to teach
medical students. It was cool how detailed and accurate these models were. We
then went to the Freud house where he both lived and did psychiatric analysis
on his patients. Freud was very interested in people’s sexual feelings in
psychiatric analysis and enjoyed smoking cigars, so an artist came through the
museum and put up some penis statues, some cigar statues, and some penis/cigar
hybrid statues. I’d be interested to see the psychiatric analysis of the
artist. I guess I just don’t understand art sometimes. We also went to the
museum of natural history, it was basically a lot of stuffed animals. We saw
the largest prehistoric turtle skeleton, which the United States accidentally
sold to the Austrians, not our proudest moment I guess.
On Thursday
we left for Prague for our second free weekend. Prague was an interesting place.
The city was cool, but the people were unfriendly for the most part. On Friday
I flew a plane about a half hour outside of Prague, it was awesome! The pilot
took off and immediately let me take the stick. I flew around for 30 minutes
then he took over to land. I guess I did pretty well since I’m still alive to
write this blog. The next day we toured the Prague castle, it was a little
disappointing that we couldn’t go inside, but the views from the castle were
great. So that day at lunch we went to what looked like a nice restaurant. We
ordered our food; they were a little impatient and short with us, which wasn’t
too unusual for Prague. Then the waitress told me to “wake up” when I didn’t
instantly claim my food when she brought it out, so at this point I decided she
wasn’t getting a tip from me. Then they just didn’t bring out three peoples
food, brought us our bill and made a point to tell us service wasn’t included
and we should tip 10%. Needless to say,
I didn’t tip, and between the eight of us they got one crown for service (which
is about one quarter). For some reason they genuinely thought they earned a tip
and were furious, the waitress not so subtly threatened to murder us, so we got
out of there. I think after this experience we were all ready to head back to
Bonn.
On Sunday
we went back to Bonn for just enough time to wash our clothes, repack and leave
for Hannover on Tuesday. In Hannover we visited the largest heart and lung
transplant/ implant center in Germany and got a presentation from one of the
doctors. It was really interesting, I didn’t know we had the technology to
attach a pump to the heart to help certain heart diseases. After that we visited a research center where
they studied regeneration using Axolotls that can regenerate entire body parts
with no scarring. They also harvested spider silk to use as scaffolding for
certain regenerative procedures. They told us they successfully filled an 8 cm
neuron gap in someone’s arm using spider silk coiled inside a blood vessel as
scaffolding to regenerate the neurons. They’re apparently researching this
technique for ALS as well.
Today we
leave for the island of Norderney in the North Sea, Ill post a blog about it
soon.
Wednesday 7/22/2015
No comments:
Post a Comment