Bonn and Manfred

Alright where to start. It is our last full week in Bonn and I felt like we just got here. After traveling around Europe at lightening speed on the weekends, coming back to the homey city of Bonn is always a relief. We did a lot of cool things this week.

On Tuesday half of our group went to the University Hospital to observe surgeries. I have got to say I was hardly prepared for what I was going to see. I have seen routine surgeries before; orthopedic, urology, general, ophthalmology, but never anything like I witnessed there. We scrubbed up and the head anesthesiologist took to me to my room and introduced me to the doctors and nurses. He told me I would be observing a Coronary Bypass Heart Surgery on a patient that recently had a heart attack. The surgeon sawed through the sternum of the patient and pushed apart the lungs and right in front of me was the beating heart. Holy Sh**ße, as you would say in “Germanglish”. I have never seen anything like that before. I was positioned probably 1 foot from the patients open chest cavity. I wasn’t exactly sure how a coronary bypass procedure was done, and I learned a lot from witnessing these surgeons in action. At the same time the doctor was opening up the chest, two more physicians/assistants were cutting open the patient’s leg in order to get a venous graft to use for the bypassing loop. They used a machine that acted as the heart/lungs to take blood from the venous return, oxidize it, bypass the heart, and have it sent on its way to the rest of the body so the patient had proper blood flow to his brain and other organs. The doctor’s successfully attached the grafts and nearly 7 hours later the heart was beating on it’s own again. You better believed I stayed there the entire time. That night we all shared our surgical experiences in the University of Bonn Park until dark. (Ask Paisley and Marissa about the surgery they observed :0 )

The next day was another early one as well. We took a bus down the river and cruised down the Rhein on a huge cruise ship. I think we saw legitimately 100 castles lining the river and even got to hike up to the top of the Rheinfels castle for a little tour, soup, and drinks. But this wasn’t the last time we hiked up to the castle, Paisley left her purse there (oops) so the next day we went all the way back an hour away by train and sprinting up and down the hills in the rain. We got to the top and relaxed under an umbrella, storming all around us, and had a great meal overlooking the River Rhein.

There was another excursion on Friday, this time to the Cologne Zoo. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to one and the animals at the Austin Zoo don’t really compare. I had to leave a little bit early to catch a flight to our next weekend destination, and missed the feeding of the elephants :(. I wish we could’ve stay for that considering our flight was delayed for 3 hours……….

It was all worth it though. Sarah, Miguel, Bre, Paisley, and I headed to Switzerland and it was legitimately the coolest place I have visited in Europe. We quickly went from Zurich by train to a little town called Buchs SG on the border of Lichtenstein and surrounded by the Sevelen Mountains. This secluded small town was the exact opposite of other big cities that we visited like Paris, Prague, Amsterdam, ect, and I loved it so much. The main reason for enjoying our short weekend to Buchs was our gracious host who was a friend of my mom’s friend, totally random, never met the guy, but was one of the nicest and happiest people I have ever met; Manfred. He’s a biomedical engineer and co-owner of an orthopedic device company (pretty much what I want to do with biomedical engineering) in Houston who studied his undergrad in Zurich and obtained his masters at UT in Austin. I reached out to him and honestly did not expect anything to come of it, but I’m so glad that I did. He invited us to stay a night up in his secluded mountain cabin, which we all thought was too good to be true. Upon arriving in Buchs, he gave us a tour across the border to the neighboring, insanely tiny, country of Lichtenstein and then the oldest part of Buchs right on a little pond. After the short little tour, we stopped at the grocery store to stock up on food and Swiss chocolate, and Manfred insisted on paying for it all!! And then he let us borrow his car for the weekend!! I really can’t put into words how welcoming and helpful he was for us, it made the weekend so enjoyable.

The first day there we hiked around the secluded Sevelen Mountains and ran into many friendly farm animals. As we walked through a few farms along our hike, the farm dogs would come running tails wagging and begging for us to love on them. We also fed some horses along the way, I really felt like a local farmer up in the mountains by the end. That evening we watched the sunset and swam in the chilly Walensee and ended the evening with some home cooked sausages, spaghetti and wine. The cabin was a little bit creepy at night and half of us were freaking out over some rustling in the brush that turned out to be a tiny cat….. The next day, unfortunately our last day, we made breakfast and headed down from the cabin for a hike around the mountains. It was so nice being completely surrounded by nature, with mountains, hills, trees, running streams and waterfalls taking the place of civilization. We actually only saw one other hiker on the trail the entire time. Spontaneously, we took a steep secluded trail that we had no idea where it went. Thankfully we did it because it ended up being the coolest view on top of one of the peaks overlooking the town and mountains with Lichtenstein and the palace way in the distance. Don’t worry we took plenty of pictures up there.

Leaving Switzerland was pretty disappointing with all the adventurous fun we had there, but it was so worth the trip. I’m glad I got to grow closer to nature and everyone who came along on the trip. It was definitely a weekend to remember. Next in this series, the last day in Bonn and the much anticipated Berlin excursion. Until then, tschuss!