A Week in Wien

By the time we all made it to Vienna for the second week, we gained experience getting around Europe on our own.  It was definitely a struggle and I wished I had some more arm muscle, but the reward of making it to Hotel Deutschland safely Monday morning made it all worth it.

Vienna is the best city in the world.  I fell madly in love with it from the beginning and my love for it grew more and more each day.  One of the highlights of the week was all of the amazing food.  The wienerschnitzel, apfelstrudel, sachertorte, goulash, chocolate soufflé, and mélange all made my taste buds tingle.  I wanted to eat five meals a day because one week was hardly enough to experience it all.  Another thing I found enchanting about the city was the café couture.  If I had an extra afternoon in Vienna, I would want to spend it in a café with a good book and a mélange. The café couture reminded me of some of the coffee shops in College Station but there really isn’t a comparison.  Sweet Eugene’s has nothing on Café Demel.

Another thing I found intriguing about the city was the artistic influence.  As I walked through the city, I would just stumble upon statues of great composers.  I took pictures next to Chopin and Brahms and tried to picture myself in Vienna in the time of all of the great composers.   It would be a lovely experience.  Going to the concert of Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony in a cathedral was so wonderful.  The music was great and it was so fun to take in all of the interesting details of the cathedral as the musicians played.  The art at the Belvedere was also breathtaking.  I especially enjoyed the Klimt exhibit.  It was cool to see how he developed as an artist throughout his life and The Kiss was such a beautiful piece of art.

I also obviously enjoyed the medical aspect of the trip.  The medical walk through Vienna was so informative and it was interesting that so much medical history occurred in such a short walking distance.  I just wish I wrote down all of the names of the physicians.  Visiting the Freud house was very interesting to me.  Freud was an incredibly influential psychologist and although so many of his theories seem far-fetched and strange, there is much merit to many of them.  I enjoyed sitting on the couch in his psychoanalysis room and breathing in his air.  The next day at the Vienna Medical School was also great.  I found myself completely jealous about how medical students go through medical school and how they don’t have to first get their bachelor’s degree.  Touring the round asylum with the pathological wax models and the other preparations was one of the coolest things I have ever done.  I wished I knew more about the diseases but I tried to imagine myself as a medical student learning from those models in another era.  The models were so lifelike.  I felt the same way about the Josephinum wax models.  The obstetrics room was my favorite because I found the different positions of the baby in the uterus to be interesting and the different models with the twins.  I was completely impressed with the detail in each of the models and was stunned that it was all so accurate until Dr. Wasser pointed out the lymph node man.  They weren’t perfect.

Vienna was amazing.  I definitely want to go back someday.