I held a lot of preconceptions about Germany, and many of them were correct. People ate pretzels, and there was a lot of beer. People were blonde and incredibly respectful and thoughtful. I didn't know a word of the language and I'd never held a euro coin before.
I went as a part of a 14-day immersive EMBO course on light sheet microscopy, the field which I am very familiar and love dearly. I traveled 26 hours to Dresden, a small-ish town two hours (by train) south of Berlin, on the eastern side of Germany, near the Czech Republic. The main town of Neustadt was unspeakably gorgeous, who's pre-WWII stone structures follow the winding randomness of the Elbe river, in an intentional yet stochastic distribution. Golden statues remembering another time spectrally contrast the dark stone in a way that makes one contemplate life two or three centuries previous. I got to see this place, for but a single Sunday, during the Dresdner Stadtfest.
I went to this place mainly to work at the Max Planck Institute of MicroBiology, where I assembled, tested, tuned, and imaged with many lightsheet microscopes. I may confidently say that for that time, I was at the birthplace of the field which I love, where visionaries like Ernst H. Steltzer collaborated with the likes of Eric Betzig, Jan Huisken, Pavel Tomancak, Philipp Keller and others to cradle the development of imaging modalities with tremendous ability. These people are sort of, my mental mentors. Their works have influenced the manor with which I approach questions, in profound ways. Just being there, and being able to speak and drink much too much espresso with many of them was an incredible pleasure that I will never forget. Not only that, but talking with young, up-in-coming people in the field like Ulrik Gunther and Loic Royer was an amazing opportunity.
While I was there, I built a sheet illumination microscope and imaged a random insect that was found in the dirt in front of the institute by the in-house Biology expert and one of sheet illumination's founding contributers, Emmanuel G. Reynaud.
Three views of a random creature, taken in the 532nm laser line, with a T-configured SPIM