Welcome to Prague

On our first free weekend we went to Prague in the Czech Republic. Prague is a beautiful city with some older buildings. The first thing that we visited in Prague was Prague Castle. It was not as much of a “castle” as I expected it to be, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t interesting. The view from just outside the castle is astounding. You can look down over the whole city and see absolutely everything. Karl’s Bridge was also another site we visited on the first day. It was very ornate with sculptures everywhere, and the view up and down the river was impressive. On the second day in Prague, we went to the Jewish Museum. The thing that was most breathe taking was a couple rooms with names of the victims of the holocaust and where the people were from. Even though the list was only from the Czech Republic it still took up all of three or four medium sized rooms from wall to ceiling. We also saw an exhibit on Terezin, the concentration camp just outside of Prague.

The skills training lab in Berlin has been one of my favorite course related activities so far. It was very interesting to hear from current German medical students and learn how to do basic procedures such as CPR and intubations. I was very pleased that I was able to successfully do the intubation on the first try. I have heard that this is one of the hardest skills to learn, and I know that doing it on a real person will be different than the dummy, but non the less it was good to know I could at least do it on the dummy.

On Tuesday we went to Dresden, which I was not all that impressed with. The city was nice and small, but I was not as impressed with the buildings as much as I had been in previous cities. I think one of the things that I didn’t really like was that the buildings were relatively new. I just think it takes some of the value of a church being ornate and impressive inside when modern equipment and fake marble were used to build it.

The hygiene museum was very interesting, and not at all what I expected. I was thinking that we were going to see displays on soap, but there was much much more than that. One thing that I found most interesting about the museum and Europe in general is the level of censorship. You would never find a museum in the U.S. that used the word “fuck” in a display, even for educational purposes. This to me has been one of the major cultural differences between the U.S. and Europe.