Djapana: Day 24: Berlin to Göttingen/Witzenhausen

Left Berlin on a train to Göttingen for a reason I will discuss below. After that I went back to stay with a friend of a friend of mines mums house....follow? Anyway, she lived in Witzenhausen, a close by small gorgeous town where they grow really yummy Cherries. Jeanne, the lady who I was staying with is from Togo but has lived here for 40 years, working as a midwife and now semi retired so teaching babies swimming lessons. Pretty amazing really, tough start to life, new country, high level career and she speaks her native tongue, French, German and English. Wow. With her I visited a 93 year old lady that she visits daily (she is healthy enough but lonely, and Jeanne feels a debt to her for the last looked after her children while she worked many years ago). Jeanne's sister was also staying that week, so they of course cooked me up a feast that night... Salmon, prawns, salad, veggies. And I'm quantities you can imagine from an African mum!

So when in Göttingen:

Ok so this post might be a little bit weird for all the non-Osteo's reading.... So feel free to be weirded out. Basically there is a German embryologist (Erich Bledschmidt) that many osteopaths around the world love and use his findings and teachings to develop their practise. He is a dude. Basically did what no one else had done (well anyway) and got a heap of really really young embryos and solidified then dissected them, and has carefully and accurately made model reconstructions to a size the human eye can comprehend. And his teachings/research comes from these tangible models. He has since passed away, but an Aussie professor - Brian Freeman, who lectures on this style of embryology, and I have had the fortune of seeing him speak twice and also on some DVDs (thanks Anna M). It's pretty darn complex stuff. We're talking about all the stuff that happens before 6 weeks of gestation, so minuscule and extremely amazing!!

In a university in Göttingen there is the museum containing all of these specimens for you to visit. It's almost like a warehouse room, sadly I don't think it's visited very often (the guest book there - in hitch I found names I knew - has a first entry from about 15 years ago and still the same guest book! Haha. Anyway, it was awesome to have no only the museum but almost the whole university to myself (summer break)...

Here are some of the models.... I have listed the size of some of them