Like a Rolling Stone...

...not really, but I've felt like that lately. The day after my last post the group took a day trip to Dresden. A really nice-sized city with a lot to see, about a two hour train ride from Berlin. I was was probably my favorite spot up to that point. Then came Prague... after our day in Dresden, 10 of us took another 2-hour train ride over to Prague while the other 5 students, along with Dr. Wasser and Stefi, went back to Berlin. Our group spent two nights in Prague at this great hostel called Sir Toby's. We met a ton of people staying at the hostel and I got to call home for the first time in a while.

But we could all definitely tell we were in a different country. Prague itself was full of more English speakers than Berlin and seemed to attract more tourists. It's also a bit darker and more ominous than Berlin and the rest of Germany, with a more Transylvania feel to it, if that makes any sense. For these reasons and the fact that we had a great hostel experience, Prague has been my favorite city so far. It's a very walkable city with most of its worthy sites within a mile of each other.

After our first night at Sir Toby's, we spent the next day seeing as much of the city as we possibly could. First, we went to the Old Town Square for some shopping and picture taking. We made our way across the river and hiked up about 5 thousand stairs to the Prague Castle. From there we could literally see the whole city, it was beautiful. We got a bit to eat and slowly headed down this road to Charles Bridge, the famous bridge that I think was in the first scene of Mission Impossible... Anyway, the bridge is amazing and after we crossed it we met a guy on the street advertising a concert at the Prague Philharmonic, which was located about a block away. So we all went over to check it out and got a cheap student price for a concert with a small chamber ensemble with 8 players - 4 violins, a viola, fiddle, cello, and standup bass - who played some of the best music I'd heard in a long time. The concert lasted about an hour, and included recognizable pieces like Blue Danube and Ave Maria.

We spent our last night in Prague in the hostel pub with a few Aussies that we met: Tom, Aimee, and Mike. We played this game Pass the Ace that a few of us knew and we had a great time. We did some more shopping yesterday before we got back to Berlin. On our way to the bahnhof we saw this girl walking her dog and potbelly pig... that's right... her pig, on a leash. Lauren took a picture of it and the lady looked at us like "what are you doing...". So that was the weird experience of that city. Anyway, we got back safe last night, and today we spent our time in the Charite Medical Center in Berlin. First we took a tour of their pathology museum, then had a lecture on Rudolf Virchow, the founder of the pathology institute and museum. The museum had a lot of interesting specimens and was pretty cool altogether given how tired I was. This morning I woke up at 6:30 to go for a run, only to find that it was about 5 degrees F outside. Needless to say I didn't last too long, but still got in a good run around Charlottenburg.

Anyway, we had lunch at a cafe in the med center, and walked to another area for a guest lecture by Dr. Claude Witt, a doctor of complimentary and alternative medicine. It was a very fair, professional lecture, and built on what we learned in our first guest lecture on homeopathy. It actually turns out that homeopathy isn't as effective as it seemed, but is still worthy of study for sure. After that we hopped on the train to Hannover, took the subway to our hotel, and here we are. We got dinner at a local Tex-Mex place, which actually had great chili. We all had a good time now that we are all back together, and are looking forward to our time in Hannover, Goettingen, and eventually Amsterdam and Vienna. We've a very busy couple of days ahead, with hopefully enough time for some much needed laundry...

I love and miss everyone at home and hope everyone's doing well!

PEACE

Asher

P.S. It's supposed to be 3 degrees F here tomorrow... I can't wait...