Week 4

Monday we took the train from Munich to Vienna and met back up with our school group to check into the hotel. It was so nice to be staying so close to everyone else! No having to take 30 minute buses to meet up! And then we took a short walking tour of Vienna and it was gorgeous, I can’t believe I wasn’t more excited to come to this city. I mean I didn’t know anything about it but it turns out it’s so pretty! Walking around downtown was like walking through a marble dream. The only down side was the smell- I’m guessing they don’t have the best sewage system but it was easy enough to ignore. That night we had our welcome dinner and the food was absolutely amazing. We all learned quickly to eat up at the welcome and farewell dinners =]. Tuesday we got up and took a historical walking medical tour of Vienna. It was interesting but just a lot of information, and then we went into a crypt and saw all of the caskets of the old imperial family, one of which was Maria Theresa the only empress ever in Austria. Some of us ate lunch at a really cute café that served coffee and pastries. Oh and by the way Austria is known for their coffee! How I didn’t know that I have no idea, I haven’t gone a day in Europe without drinking it so far so I’m so excited! And at the café I had my first espresso and I am in love, I never realized that coffee was just watered down espresso before. After lunch we went to the Sigmund Freud museum which was located in his old house. We learned that before the Holocaust, when Jewish people were being persecuted the Nazis allowed Jews to leave if they could pay a very high tax. Freud was very well off already but the only reason him and his family were able to leave was because people donated enough money to his cause. Afterward we had a lecture by Dr. Wasser about Freud’s life. And then that night we went to a local operetta! It’s like a mini opera, and opera with dialogue. It was really good, their voices were gorgeous and it was in German but I could understand it for the most part. It was fun to dress up and go out for a night! And then Wednesday we went to the Vienna museum in the morning and saw a bunch of models of how Vienna grew over the years into the city it is today. And then we visited Stephen’s Church, a huge church that seemed to be right in the middle of downtown. It was massive and so pretty, with the gothic architecture of the Koeln cathedral but with a roof that was tiled with yellow, blue and white it was just so unique! After we had free time and some of the other girls and I ate lunch and then headed to the Museum Quarter district to see a Salvador Dahli art exhibit. The quarter was in the back of this artsy square filled with all of these huge, plastic, bright lounge chairs with people chatting, eating and sleeping on them. I wish I could have just spent the whole day there it was so incredibly chill and everyone was there just to enjoy art and have a good time. The Salvador Dahli exhibit was definitely something else. My theory is that he was both an amazing artist and a genius. His earlier paintings were gorgeous and so different than anything else of that time period, but the more recognition he got for his surrealism the more liberties he took with it. I’m convinced that some of his sculptures were random things he just put together and called surrealism to see if someone would buy it, and they did! But that’s just me. Then we met up with the rest of the group to go to a cute little wine garden. Thursday we visited the Viennese Medical School and learned about the differences between medical schools in Vienna and in America. For example research shows that people are worse at selecting good physicians than standardized testing, so in Vienna applicants are admitted solely on how they score on standardized tests. And in Vienna non-clinical and clinical learning is integrated so that students learn skills along with theory studies and then must master them. Afterward we went to a physiology museum located in a building that used to be an insane asylum. It was filled with a bunch of wax models that had been molded off of people who had suffered from all sorts of disgusting diseases and then painted to look just like it. The tour guide was really knowledgeable and interesting and always had something cool to say about anything we asked. The best part was a case that had skeletons of conjoined and Siamese twins who had dies very young. It was insane the way some of them were connected, there was on pair that was attached to where their bodies were facing each other and perpendicularly one face was facing forward and the other one backward, but they were both on one head, super strange. We ate at a Pakistan restraint afterward that was pretty good, it was buffet style so we took however much we wanted and then when we left we were supposed to give how much we thought it was worth. It was a really cool concept I had never heard of a restaurant doing before but they looked like they were doing well so I guess the concept can be successful! Then we went to the old hospital which is a museum now and we toured the old library that was filled with loads of old books, mostly in Latin but some were in German and a lot about medicine! It was fun, I love the smell of old books and the pages had a cool texture because they had had to be printed off of engravings. Then we went to a museum of pharmacology and saw all sorts of things, my favorite being the old hand turned centrifuges and shakers and the old surgeons kit. Then we had our farewell dinner at a restaurant called the 7 Stern Brau because they brew seven kinds of beer! It was an awesome last night in Vienna with great food and even better people =]