Day 53 - Ashes and Presentations

Happy Ash Wednesday!! I woke up really early today to get to mass at 8 am so I could get my ashes before classes started...then I pressed my snooze button until a more reasonable time that still allowed me to go to the mass. I met up with 2 other crazy people that decided to get up early enough to go through the whole mass of Ash Wednesday. We got there, and I could actually understand about 40% of the mass. I heard a lot of "40 tagen" (40 days), "Ashern" (ashes), and Jesus being my friend, your friend. Then they gave us ashes before letting us go on our way. When we got out, we discovered it was only 8:15 and realized that we hadn't had any of the readings or the Eucharist. It wasn't so much of a mass as it was an ash-giving ceremony. It wasn't so bad though, that allowed us to get some Starbucks coffee before heading to AIB to work on homework or the presentation that we were doing later that day.

Look at us and our cool ashes

When class finally started about an hour and a half later, we learned more about renal physiology and the regulation of fluids and electrolytes. After that class, we had a few minutes before lunch was given to us by AIB in the form of potato soup, both vegetarian and not. Luckily a lot of Germany is Catholic and doesn't eat meat on Ash Wednesday or Fridays in Lent, so the meat in the regular soup was salmon. When lunch was finished, we filled out a survey on how we liked the program so far (it's AWESOME!!) and waited for our time to present our trans-tibial socket ideas.

First we went through a routine that helped us to identify when we tensed up and relax before our presentation. Each group then presented their ideas to the class, and when it finally came to our turn, we were ready. But then the power-point came up. It wasn't the new one with my awesome 3-D drawing and the new improvements, but the old skeleton that we used in initial planning. So instead of presenting at that moment, I transferred the real presentation onto a flash drive and waited until the end to present. All in all, the designs fell into one of 3 groups: positive pressure, surgical procedures, or weight bearing. We evaluated each presentation and gave our critiques and suggestions to the presenters before trying to improve our own presentation. The professors came over and answered some questions and helped us to clarify what we wanted to say, but soon we were meeting again to come up with questions for Herr Finke when we Skype him tomorrow.

When we had a substantial amount of questions, we ended for the day, and I went straight home. Then I ate dinner, sat a bit with my host family, talked to my mom, dad, and brother (for the first time!!) as well as reconnected with a friend. Now it's time for sleep as I get to wake up for the early class tomorrow. Karneval, then late nights finishing projects followed by early morning pseudo-mass was probably not the best schedule of events that could have happened. Oh well, two more days before the weekend and the start of Spring Break!

Bis Bald
Erin Z