Week 3: Vienna

Vienna is a city of famous musicians and a rich scientific and medical history. It is filled with good food, especially wiener schnitzel, quiet cafes in which to enjoy rich desserts and coffee, street musicians, and many shopping opportunities. On Monday, we got to Vienna after a nice weekend in Munich. We ate lunch and then met everyone else for a tour of the city with an extremely nice older lady whom everyone loved. We also had the opportunity to tour the catacombs at the cathedral. We saw so many bones in the dark tunnels under the church and each room had its own story. One room was filled with neatly stacked bones that lined the walls. The skulls were hung in rows as well making a pattern that was artful even if it was dark. The story behind this room was that prisoners were forced to go into the catacombes to boil the fesh off these old bones of people who had had the plague. They then cleaned the bones and stacked them into the patterns that we can now see. Unfortunately for these prisioners, working down in the catacomb was nearly the same as the death sentence because of all the rats that were carriers of the disease. Many of the prisoners did not live long after they began their work. In another room of the catacombs there was a hole in the floor where you could see piles and piles of bones that had just been thrown into the hole after other rooms in the catacombs were cleaned. That Monday night we had the best group dinner of all.  I ordered wiener schitzel which was the most wonderful decision; it was so good. One of the most exciting parts of the entire week in Vienna was seeing the Josepinium. It was hard to grasp just how long those wax figures have been around. The art and skill that would have had to been employed to make such lifelike creations was amazing. The small details that we know now are wrong make the models even more special because they preserve a time long ago. It was impressive to me to learn and see on this trip just how much art is really involved in medicine. The sculptures are also such an improvement in comparison to pictures; there is nothing that can compare to things in three dimensions. On the last day, we went to the Natural History Museum. I loved this place but I needed two full days to really look and read everything I wanted to. They had an entire room filed with meteorites! There was also room upon room of stuffed animals. It was like a zoo but you could look closely at the animals, and birds, and bugs, and fish, and even butterflies. If I get to come back to Europe, I need to go back to that museum again. It also amazed me because the beautiful building was built only for the purpose of being a museum. The story behind the emperess's husband who began the collecting made the experience even more special.