Berlin and Dresden

Berlin Otto Bock Science Center: Going to the Otto Bock science center was a great way to hype up the excitement for the actual facilities in Deuderstadt. While I didn’t get as much out of the science center as it seems the rest of the group did it still was very interesting. The best part was seeing the C-Leg in action. If you walked on this treadmill then the C-Leg mimicked your pace, so that was awesome to watch in close detail the movement of one of the worlds most advance prosthetics.

The Charite skill training center: Perhaps the most fascinating part of the time spent at the training center was just to hear how different medical school is in Germany. The students here don’t have to pay a cent compared to students in America. I think the actual amount was 500 euro a year, so not much. The other fun thing was learning to do a intubation on a dummy. It was some how both easy and difficult to do. The actual process was very simple, just open up the airway with that metal device and slide the tube down the trachea but it quite obvious that when having to perform this on a real person, your nerves could make the whole process much harder. If I’ve learned anything from life guarding its that simple things like CPR and first aid are really easy until you have to do it on a your first real person.

Dresden: The lunch in Dresden was the best meal I have had during this whole visit. I ordered the pork knuckle which was a massive slab of meat with two bones jetting out of it. I wasn’t exactly sure what part of the pig the knuckle was going to be, but I’m pretty sure that it was one of the knees of the pig. Fortunately we stumbled into this amazing restaurant for launch, the consensus of the group was that all the meals were delicious.

The Church of Our Lady: Although I feel like seeing the rubble of a church destroyed by allied bombs in WWII would have been a powerful statement against the costs of war, the rebuilt church was much more spectacular and moving than I anticipated. What especially struck me as beautiful was the speckled pattern of sandstone that was used to construct the building. Most of the church was made from newer tan sandstone, but many stones were much older, being the original stones from the church that was there prior to WWII. These original stones were covered with a black film, which could have partly been from the smoke and dust caused by the bombing of that area, but this checkerboard pattern gave the church a very unique look, one that I will not forget.

Hygiene Museum: The Deutsches Hygiene Museum was a lot cooler than I would have thought. The fact that it was so interactive puts it up there with the best museums I’ve seen. My favorite interactive was the mind ball game. This was a competition between you and your friend to see who had the most control over their own brainwaves. In this game there was a device that the player would strap to their heads, which measured the intensity of the alpha and beta waves of the brain. These two waves indicate the level of concentration and activity of the brain, where there is lower alpha and beta waves then the less activity the brain is engaged in. The object of the game was to have the lowest brain waves, or be the most relaxed. Even though the device seemed to be slightly calibrated incorrectly (one headset would always win) the device still gave a good enough illustration of the relative activity of the brain. It was easy to see the changes in the strength of the waves when you had a little thought going on versus when you were being heavily stimulated.

Deutsches Historisches Museum: While I did enjoy all of the exhibits of the German History Museum, the 20th century parts were the most interesting for me. I particularly enjoyed the Nazy propaganda posters. What I found intriguing was the deep social statements that these posters were making. I had seen the anti-Semitic posters before and of course had understood their meaning and basically where and how those ideas manifested themselves, but what was really strange to me were the posters depicting the perfect “Arian” family. In the one we stopped to look at was a family consisting of two older boys and their father, and one younger girl her mother and a small infant that she held. The thing I found most creepy was how the Nazi’s viewed the role of women. The only value they saw in women was their ability to produce more men, which was a much more twisted message then I had first seen in the poster. I had merely seen the emphasis of the “strong male” in the picture, which I always knew was an important thing in warrior cultures like that of the Nazis.