Because Sometimes, We Do What We Want

Again, I apologize for the tardiness, but I mainly blame the internet :)

As our last day in Hannover, our program had us going to visit the various clinics of TiHo. I chose to go to the cattle clinic, and had a blast. The veterinarians there were kind enough to allow us to sit in on a couple surgeries, one involving a bone infection of the medial coffin bone of both thoracic limbs and the other dealing with hardware’s disease. This allowed us to view some of the different facilities, approaches, and how they handled the animals themselves. First off, the animal handling caught me off guard. In the area of Texas that we are in, there are mostly meat cattle. These are more or less wild and precautions as such need to be taken. In Germany though, most of the cattle are dairy cattle. The are constantly handled, haltered, and rather compliant. This means that in the entirety of the clinic, there exists about two chutes to control them. Most of the time you just walk into the pen and poke on it like it’s a big dog. And most of them are. It’s rather ridiculous.

After the clinic visits, we had some free time before heading to the opera! This was my first time to attend an opera and I ran into some difficulties. The opera was “Carmen”, which is sung in French. Being in Germany, the supertitles were in German. So that left me just watching and trying to figure out exactly what is going on not by the words, but really the actions and facial expressions. Let’s just say that it was more a “visual” experience than anything else. Still, it was good and very interesting, hopefully the next one that I get to see will have a language that I understand involved in some way. ;)

And that leaves us with our second free weekend! Some of us decided to take it slow and stay in Hannover for an extra couple days, letting us sleep in on Saturday and Sunday to finally catch up on some of the little sleep we’ve been getting. We did a couple mundane things like run to the grocery store, etc, but then some of us went to help out with evening rounds at the cattle clinic. It was a great experience! We got to really handle some of the animals (remember the no chute thing) and get an insight on a lot of the different practices. Also, there were near 40 patients there at the time, and way too many of them needed drenches. This is where you pump 30L of water with some medicine directly into the rumen. By the end of the evening, all of us were tired of using the hand pump to push it in there.

Finally, on Sunday, we took a walking tour of Hannover itself. More than 50% of Hannover city limits is green space, so that definitely allowed for some great scenery. We also traveled to the top of the Hannover city hall for some spectacular views. To get up there though, you have to take an elevator that travels along the curve of the dome. That means lateral movement! One of the oddest feelings ever! Then we topped off the day with a visit to a beach bar, an area on top of a parking garage where they truck in tons of sand to create a fake beach 100 feet in the air. Most random bar ever. Quickly, on to Basel!