Days 8 & 9

Location: Berlin, Deutchsland

This first half of the week has been amazing. Many pictures have been taken, many objects have been seen, many fingers have felt frozen; but all in all, it was facinating.

Monday had us up and going to the Charite Skill Training Center for Doctors, located in former East Berlin. I had not slept so well the night before, but when they took us into a room to perform tasks on dummies, I was suddenly wide awake (which lasted for the day). By far, the most useful thing that I learned was about placement of tubes going into the trachea of paitents. I had "drenched" cattle before, but this procedure required finesse to place the tube into the patient's trachea so that air can reach the lungs. I will keep this in mind for future procedures. After that, we had a bus tour of Berlin. At least, that was what they called it. The tour guide (a Seattle native) walked us most of the time. We began by the Reichstag and saw Holocaust memorials, a close up of the Brandenberg Gate (as in, no stage in front and walking through), part of the Berlin Wall which remains standing, and several of the old Imperial buildings which miraculously survived World War II and the subsequent Communist regieme. Unfortunantly, when we got to the last part, the batteries in my camera died. This would remain a problem until the afternoon of the next day in Dresden. Finally on Monday, we went to the Otto Bock Science Center in Berlin. This was a facinating museum dedicated to a company (Otto Bock) which works on prostetic limbs. It is utterly facinating not only how modern prostetics work, but how far and how fast they have advanced technologically in what seems to be a short time.

The next day, we were in Dresden, the capital of Saxony, the distant state of my ancestors. Dresden had been almost completely wiped out during the great fire storm near the end of World War II and had subsequently been placed under East German control. So much of the city had lain in ruins or been abandoned for so long; but now, the city is once a gain a great European pearl, the new build around and holding up the old. Beautiful symbology in my opinion. We began with a city tour through the Protestant Church (Frauenkirche) with its esquisetly redone Baroque interior, the palace (or parts of it) of the Saxon kings, particularly Albert the Strong, and we were able to see parts of the newer museums and the Opera House. Following lunch (I went different this time and ordered Saxon potato soup which was quite good), we toured the German Hygine Musuem. Don't let the name fool you - this was a fairly extensive (and sometimes graphic) discription of human life from birth to death. While in the museum, we were broken up into groups and given the task of taking one subject (which equated to one exhibit room) and learn a little about it to present to the others. I was paired with Vazanny (the other pre-vet student), and given the room for Eating and Drinking for one reason - what was by far the coolest thing in the museum - the glass cow. That's right, much like the glass woman in the front of the museum, there was, sitting in the middle of the room, a glass cow for all to see the organs of. I cannot describe my joy at this.

Well, that's all for now. Tune in again Thursday!