Last week was my last week in Dresden. I left on Thursday to stay with my sister and brother-in-law at their house in southwestern Germany for a little over a week before I head back to the U.S.! Since I got this scholarship through the American Chemical Society to come here, part of the deal is that I write a paper (a scientific paper, as if it were to be published, although it won't actually be published) and make a poster to present at the ACS Fall National Meeting in August. My internship technically ends this Friday, but my advisor and my Ph.D. student/mentor are fine with me working on the paper and poster from my sister's place.

The last few weeks at work have been pretty hectic (even though I've been gone a lot), and it seems like they're only going to keep getting busier. I only have four more weeks in Germany! I'm trying to end my internship a week early, so I can either go on a trip - I'm thinking Paris maybe! - and/or stay with my sister and brother-in-law for a little while before heading back to the U.S. However, I have a lot of experiments and work to do, a paper to write on my project, and a poster to make for my presentation in Washington, D.C. in the middle of August after I get back, and I'm hoping to get all this done in the next three weeks!

Last weekend I took a train to Prague, only two hours away from Dresden, and met up with Sarah again for the weekend. It was a really fun trip; it just so happened to be Prague's city celebration that particular weekend, so there were boothes up in the Old Market Square all day Saturday, with what I think was probably the czech version of fair food, like we have mini donuts and corn dogs. There was live music playing all afternoon and evening there, too. We stayed in a hostel, which turned out to be pretty nice and clean actually, and really convenient (not to mention cheap!). One thing that both of us noticed was that there were sooo many Americans there! The part of town with all the old historical sites was very tourist-oriented. Almost everything was in English there, actually. For some reason the picture uploader tool on this thing isn't working for me right now, but I'll put some Prague pics up when it is.

I gave my presentation to the lab on Monday! I was supposed to give an overview of the research I've done at the end of my project, but since there are a bunch of people leaving for vacation after this week, I did it now. I hadn't really done a whole lot of experiments that I had definite results for yet, so it was kind of an overview of what I will do I guess, and now I don't have to give one at the end! It was pretty nerve-racking, but a good experience overall, speaking in front of all these Dr.s and Ph.D. students.

I'm taking this Fri. and next Mon. off to go see my sister and brother-in-law in Kaiserslautern (southwestern Germany). She works on an army base there as a dentist, so we're going to celebrate the 4th with the Americans. Then I'm working Tuesday and Wednesday, and taking Thursday and Friday off to go to the DAAD/RISE conference in Heidelberg - basically a meeting of all the students in the same program as I am. It's such a hard life, working two days a week and enjoying Germany the rest of the time!

Work really started picking up last week and this week! Our supervisor wants us to do some extra experiments with the titanium samples we work with - he wants us to grow cells on them, and analyze the cell adhesion after 24 hours, and also take scanning-electron-microscopy pics of the samples at a bunch of different time points. The problem is: neither Judith, my Ph.D. student advisor nor I know how to do cell culture! And the woman showing us how to do everything is going on vacation indefinitely starting this weekend!! So it's been busy...



I went to Berlin last weekend, and it was a blast! I met up with a friend from high school who just so happens to be in Germany for a few weeks this summer, and we stayed (for free!) with a girl who got the same scholarship as I did from the American Chemical Society for these internships in Germany. So here are some pics from Berlin:


The Reichstag building: housed the first parliament of the German empire from 1894 to 1933 when it was destroyed in a fire. Remained in ruins until after the reunification of Germany in 1990, reconstruction was complete in 1999, and it has housed the current German parliament ever since. We stood in line for probably an hour to get up into the glass dome - it was worth it! The view was great, a panorama of Berlin, and we had brochures that pointed out some important buildings throughout the city, as seen from the dome.

Here are some pictures I've been meaning to put up:

This week was a little more interesting for me at work. Up until now, I've pretty much been reading papers that people had written previously on the project, mostly about the theory/concepts we deal with in the project, and I've also been doing a lot of observing the Ph.D. student I'm working under, watching her do prep work and also doing experiments. This week, I got to do some experiments on my own, with Judith's supervision. Wednesday, one of the women who works at the Max Bergmann Zentrum had a BBQ. Most of the people I know from the lab went to that, it was fun! Everyone seems really cool, very relaxed, even at work.

The weather was nice today, so Judith and her boyfriend took me to Swiss Saxonia. And I forgot my camera!! I can't believe I did that. It's sooo beautiful, I wish I had pictures. We took about a 3o-minute train ride east out of Dresden, toward the Czech Republic, then crossed the Elbe river on a ferry to get to the base of the hills.



I found this picture on google.(http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00039/saxon-switzerland_39283t.jpg)
The whole area is very wooded, and once you get higher up, there are these sandstone peaks. We hiked up the normal dirt trails in the forest, but when we got to the rocks they had metal ladders and supports for us to climb up. I'm pretty sure this isn't the exact peak we were on, but we were on something similar. The view was amazing!

I've been living in Dresden, Germany for a little over two weeks now, for an internship at the Technsiche Universitaet Dresden. I'm working under a Ph.D. student, Judith Reichert, on a project that deals with titanium-based implants. The goal of the project is to modify the surfaces of these implants, attaching antibiotics and growth factors, so that the implants have a better success rate in patients with compromised immune systems, like smokers or diabetics, for instance. It's really interesting to me, and I feel so lucky that I get to work on something cool like this...in Germany...the whole summer! As an undergrad, I don't really have a say in what kind of experiments I get to do, but it's been great so far, even just learning about the project and getting used to the environment of a German research lab.

I live in Altstadt, a section of the city that has a lot of the really old buildings with a lot of history. My building is really modern-looking, though, and HUGE (I'm on the 13th floor out of 17). I have my own room that's basically the size of a dorm, and then I share a tiny kitchen and tiny bathroom with another dorm room. I'm supposed to have a roommate, but no one has shown up yet.

My advisor is letting me use her old bike for the summer, so I can bike anywhere I need to go on a regular basis. Once I decide to go a little further out and see other parts of Dresden, I'll have to use the tram or something, but they have a great public transportation system, so I'm not worried. I've been hearing lots of good things about Saxon Switzerland, an area of Saxony, the German state that Dresden is in. I'm hoping to check that out soon; it's a little way from Dresden, and I guess it's the most mountainous region of Saxony, so it should be good for a hike.

That's it for now! It's a beautiful evening, and I'm going for a run!