Berlin and Guben, Germany

          Oh my goodness, I know it has been forever since I last posted and I'm sorry!  It's just that we got back very late Monday night, then had a test Tuesday, presentation Wednesday, and another test Thursday, so I haven't had much time until now.  Plus, our trip was so long and so packed with amazing sights and stories that the thought of blogging it has been too overwhelming!  But I'll give it a try.

          We flew out of Brussels on Thursday, September 16, and arrived at our hotel in Berlin early that evening.  Since this was part of our group trip and Baylor booked the hotel, it was super nice!  It might be the fanciest place I have ever stayed, besides places we have been in Mexico.  There was a huge chandelier, extremely comfortable beds, robes and slippers in our room, and my favorite: the bathroom floor was heated!  I have no idea why, but that really fascinated me.  So after we all oohed and ahh-ed over our rooms, a group of us ventured out for dinner.  We hadn't been wandering long when we came across a Mexican place and unanimously decided to stop there because we have all been missing Mexican food so much!  Unfortunately, it was a little disappointing- the food was good, just... not the tex-mex I am used to.  But they did have delicious tortilla chips which we inhaled in a matter of minutes :)

          The next day, we had an early start, but no one was complaining after we saw the hotel's breakfast buffet.  There were fancy tablecloths and waiters who brought us drinks, but more importantly, they had every single breakfast food you could possibly imagine... omelets, waffles, pancakes, muffins, sausage, bagels, TONS of fruit, yogurt, and Europe's favorite breakfast item, NUTELLA!  We all went a little crazy.  After stuffing ourselves, everyone went on a bike tour together.  In spite of chilly, rainy weather, it was fun and very educational.  I think it's neat that Berlin's history is so recent and so relevant to our generation- When we went on the bike tour in Paris everything we saw had stories behind it dating back hundreds of years, but in Berlin, I feel like everything we saw was either tied to World War II or the Cold War.  Also, since much of Berlin was bombed and destroyed in World War II, the city is overwhelmingly modern, which is a big change from all the cities we have seen so far. 

 

It's a shame that it's so cloudy because when the sun shines it makes a cross on the ball, which is ironic because the architect was atheist and was trying to create a secular symbol for Berlin.

EVERYTHING in Berlin is under construction or is being renovated

Checkpoint Charlie

The Holocaust Memorial... it's a bunch of huge concrete pillars and when you get to the center it's lonely and you can't hear the city and everything looks uniformly gray and confusing so you are supposed to get a tiny glimpse of how Holocaust victims may have felt.

          After the bike tour, we toured Charité hospital as a group.  That was fun because we have learned about Charité Hospital in History of Medicine- it was initially a quarantine station outside the city where people coming into the city were checked for the plague, to prevent the spread of the disease within the walled city.  It then became a medical school hospital, and since then has been home to several famous physicians and researchers who have made huge discoveries and contributions to medicine.  I thought it would be a hospital, but the part that we visited was more like a museum.  The best part was at the end, where there were hundreds of specimens in jars, showing all kinds of diseased and malformed body parts... I know that sounds morbid and gross, but it was very exciting and fascinating to see some of the things we have been learning about in Pathophysiology firsthand.
          The next day, we took a bus over to Guben, about two hours away, to visit the plastinarium.  The plastinarium is where all of the Bodyworlds specimens are prepared before they are sent out to exhibitions.  Basically, plastination is the process of preservation to create art from dead bodies- they use a special technique that coats the tissues and turns them into plastic so that they can be preserved forever..  This way, people can see structures of the body without actually dissecting a body, and without the formaldehyde smell!  None of the bodies have skin, so you can really see every detail of the muscles and organs.  It's actually very beautiful and not at all creepy- the bodies almost look fake so it was hard for me to visualize them as actually having been real people.  The plastinarium acquires all their bodies from people who sign up to have their body donated after they die.  I don't think that's for me, but it's pretty popular and tons of people sign up, eager to live forever in a strange way.   Plastination is such an involved process that it takes over a year to complete one body!  They are working on animal specimens right now for a new exhibit, so they had a giraffe in a HUGE tank of preservative, it was quite smelly.

 

          The city of Guben is half in Germany and half in Poland; so of course we decided to walk over and check it out after our tour of the Plastinarium.  We were kind of in a run-down part of town so it wasn't too exciting and we soon left to head back to Berlin.  A couple of girls and I spent the rest of the afternoon riding on trains and getting lost in random places around Berlin, and we stumbled across some kind of rally or protest... there were tons of people there and whatever they were protesting, they were pretty riled up about it.  There were stickers, banners, flags, food and drink booths, and a band playing angry techno rally music.  We stuck around long enough to get stickers and pictures and plenty of laughs about the situation in general.  We found out later that it was a protest against nuclear energy- I guess we can support that.  I'm just glad it didn't turn out to be some kind of crazy anti-government rally because we proudly wore our stickers for the rest of our stay in Berlin!  That night, we all had a much needed girls night in, complete with comfy hotel robes, gummy bears, and banangrams. :)

"Atomkraft? Nein danke!" :)

          Overall, I liked Berlin and I'm glad we went there, but it's not my favorite place... it has such rich, recent history which was cool, but it's too modern and industrialized for me to want to stay there long-term.  My favorite things were the science-y things we got to see.  I was eager to get to Italy, and was pretty excited when we left early the next morning (after one last breakfast feast) to catch our flight from Berlin to Venice.
I don't want to disrespect Berlin and start gushing about Italy in Berlin's post but I'll just say that it was incredible and I can't wait to blog about it!  Hopefully that will come later today.