Vienna!

This is our third week here in Europe and we were in Vienna this week.  Vienna was a beautiful city; all of the buildings architecture was remarkable. We started the week off by getting a walking tour around the city and learning some of its history.  Our guide showed us some of the major monuments like the church. Later we went to the Catacombs. In the Catacombs many priests that had served in the church had been buried there. They believe in having the heart, organs, and body be placed in different churches. Saint Stephens’s church received the organs from the different people. Also in the Catacombs were mass burial sites where they would throw victims of the black plague in after they had passed away. The rotting smells of the corps began to be smelt from the church so they stopped with the mass graves.

On Tuesday we went on a walking tour with Dr. Schnabel that turned out to be Dr. Wasser. He showed us around the city and explained some of its medical history. I learned a lot of interesting facts about Vienna such as the university use to have a fraternity that would get intoxicated and brawl. A slice on there face would indicate that they were apart of this fraternity which most of them enjoyed. Also at the university there was a prison and they would house people who had committed crimes there. If you were sentenced to death they would let the medical students dissect your body and then they would get a Christian burial. Later that day we visited a funeral museum. This outlined the way that burials have changed over the past decades. Death is a large part of there culture so they take a lot of pride in their funerals. After the tour of the museum, he let us actually lay in one of the coffins. This was quite the experience!

Wednesday we went to look at fools tower. When we got to the tower, I thought the main focus was going to be the black plague but it covered a wide range of diseases. They had different organs and wax figures of the different effects of some of the diseases. This was by far my favorite thing to see in Vienna! It was very fascinating how most of the wax figures had stories behind them. Later that night we went to the classical concert at Saint Anna’s church. They played pieces from famous composers like Beethoven and Mozart. These four people were incredibly talented and amazing to listen to.

Thursday we visited Sigmund Freud’s house and got a guided tour throughout. I learned a lot of new things about Sigmund Fraud that I didn’t know. I never knew that he was addicted to tobacco. This was interesting to me since he was a doctor, I would of thought that he would of stopped smoking once he was diagnosed with jaw cancer. I know that he didn’t think he could write when he didn’t have tobacco, but knowing the effect of cancer I would have stopped. Being able to actually see where Sigmund Freud did his work was really neat although it was extremely hot in there.

We ended this week by going to the National History Museum that housed the Body Worlds Exhibit. The museum had thousands of different animals, diamonds, art, and insects. There were so many different types of animals from monkeys, elephants, buffaloes and much more. Along with the animals, there were meteors that had fallen from space. I actually got to touch a meteor! After the National History Museum, we went to the Body Worlds Exhibit. This was my favorite museum that we saw. There were actual bodies of different people in the exhibit and each of them focused on a different part of the body. Some of the bodies showed the muscles and how they work when exercising while others showed the circulatory system and different diseases associated with it. Vienna was a very fascinating place and I learned a lot of different things throughout!