Having fun

As I write this post, there are only five more days left of my internship! April is certainly flying by faster than any other month I have been Germany. You know what they say about when time flies! Here’s a summary of what I’ve been up to since Wiener Schnitzel night:

Der Zoologische Garten: The Berlin Zoo has more species of animals than any other zoo in the world! Needless to say, it’s a big place! My two flatmates, Jim and Frederic, and I spent four hours there checking out the different exhibits. My favorites were the elephants, black bears, brown bears, polar bears, penguins, sea lions, and hippopotamuses to name a few. Two more are worth mentioning. The first was the leaf cutter ants on the third floor of the aquarium (Yes, there is actually an aquarium at the zoo too! Not very big, but worth the 5 extra euros to check out). There were two display cases on opposite sides of a large room and glass tubes that went along the ceiling connecting them, simulating the long distances the ants will carry leaves back to their colonies. The next brought me back to 1996-97 when my kindergarten class at Hoover School put on a play called The Great Kapok Tree. My friend Michael and I were both ocelots. I have never actually seen a live ocelot until I got to Berlin, so that was pretty cool as well!

Philharmonie: Maybe some of my readers will remember that visiting the Philharmonie (the concert hall of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra) was the subject of my college application essay. I discovered it on my own during the 3-day visit to Berlin with my German exchange group and was very excited to be able to hear the orchestra from the lobby! Jump ahead three years later and I knew that I had to get inside the concert hall this time around. It turns out that all the concerts of the Philharmonic sell out months in advance, plus the tickets are SUPER expensive, so I was happy spending 2 euros (3 euros if you’re a student) to take the guided tour of the building that leaves from the musicians’ entrance every day at 1:30 PM. The musicians’ entrance can be reached by crossing the parking lot located on the side of the concert hall closest to Potsdamer Straße (shameless plug for the guided tour, it’s great!). Anyway, the tour begins by walking to the main lobby that I mentioned earlier. The guide remarked how compared to other concert halls, the lobby of the Philharmonie is unornate. No red carpet, no fancy decorations, instead a wide open space where friends can meet up before the concert and chat or have a drink. (I’ll tell you what I remember about the tour in case you’re not going to be in Berlin any time soon. If I bore you, by all means, skip ahead, or better yet, stop reading all together and google “cat memes” for the next hour or so.) In the lobby, there is this really cool panorama in which a photographer photo-shopped at least a few hundred clones of himself to fill the lobby, concert hall, and stage. It was quite amusing to see what he was doing all over the picture. Next, we headed up to the top level of the concert hall and as we walked in, I heard music! No, it wasn’t the orchestra, but a solo clarinetist was rehearsing on stage, so we got to hear the acoustics of the hall, which were really quite good. The guide went into all of the small details that the architect, Hans Scharoun, used to produce the best possible sound in a hall in which the orchestra is placed in the middle. He got a lot of criticism in the 60s about how it would never work. Many at the time were strong proponents of your standard “shoe box” concert hall, in which the sound bounces directly off the back wall behind the orchestra and into the audience. Scharoun though was a big fan of democracy the tour guide said, and if you look at the seating plan you’ll see that except for a small section right in front of the orchestra, all of the seats are pretty equal in terms out what you see and what you hear. Everyone ends up having a different experience depending on where they sit, but the quality of the experience remains more or less equal. Not to mention that the ascetics of the hall are amazing. We ended the tour by visiting the chamber music hall as well, where a children’s choir was rehearsing. It was pretty much a smaller version of the Philharmonie designed by a protégé of Scharoun’s keeping his democratic ideals in mind. I’ll just end by addressing one issue that might have popped up in your head as you were reading this: how democratic is the Philharmonic today with its super expensive concerts? The good news is that every Tuesday at 1 PM (another shameless plug J), the orchestra has free lunchtime concerts in the lobby that all are welcome to attend.        

Die Charite: I am still really enjoying my internship at Charite hospital, but at the same time, my rose colored glasses have definitely come off during the last week or so. It turns out that Germany’s health care system has its problems too. I had an interesting discussion with some of the nurses the other day during Frühstück (breakfast, for the nurses who do the morning shift it’s around 10 AM since they don’t take lunch) in which we compared nursing in the US and Germany. I think the main point they drove home was even though Germany spends much less on healthcare than the US, less money puts more stress on nurses and doctors to deliver quality health care to patients. For example, a nurse that cares for patients at home often has to visit up to 20 patients in a single day! I don’t know how it is in the US, but I would be very surprised if that was also the case for American nurses. In addition, doctors at the Charite have been threatening to go on strike for quite some time now. I’m not sure about the specifics, but the idea of doctors going on strike in the US is literally unheard of as far as I know. Finally, I have even come to the conclusion that my position as a student intern only exists to help cut costs even further. My only pay is free food at breakfast and lunch that is leftover from serving the patients and there is rarely a moment when I am sitting around with nothing to do. It is clear that the nurses I work with are overwhelmed with work most days and I can only imagine what it is like without a student intern to lend a hand. Probably one of the biggest things I’ll take away from this internship when it’s over is a newfound respect for nurses. I had really no idea beforehand how much they do in an 8-hour shift that tends to actually be 9 hours. In Germany, a three-month nursing internship at the beginning of medical school is actually mandatory and I think it would be good to introduce at the very least a similar option in the US. The result is that every doctor in Germany knows firsthand what it is like to be a nurse and I am sure that does tons in terms of the potential for doctors and nurses to collaborate in providing the best possible care for patients.

Wow, this post turned out to be pretty long, my apologies. I hope it was at least somewhat interesting for you to read. Stay tuned for my next post when Jonathan finishes his internship at the Charite and begins a well-deserved two week break before starting internship #2 in Heidelberg! At least the author thinks the break will be well-deserved J. Danke fürs Lesen und bis nächstes Mal!