As much as I love Bonn, my favorite part of the program is definitely the traveling. The group excursions and free weekends offer opportunities to experience a great diversity of cities each with their own unique culture and lifestyle. So far I've been to Paris, Cologne, Vienna and Amsterdam.

Paris was an amazingly beautiful city, oozing rich history wherever you go. You can go to a random place in the city center and start walking in an arbitrary direction and stumble upon monuments and landmarks that you probably didn't know existed, and we did this several times. In fact the city was so saturated with monuments that we sometimes had the bizarre problem of not knowing which fabulously adorned street and buildings to head toward. We saw the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Mont Marte (sp?), the Louvre, the Arch du Triomphe, and countless other points of interest. I especially enjoyed the Louvre, particularly wandering through the back halls and areas away from the throngs of other tourists. Near the famous landmarks were always enormous crowds, and a huge number of sketchy street vendors, scam artists and tourist-trap restaurants. At one point I even had to forcefully shove a woman away who had grabbed onto a member of our group and was trying to distract them to pick their pockets. We made an effort to leave the popular areas and find the locals whenever we could. Occasionally we encountered people who were very rude to us for no apparent reason other than us being Americans, but on the whole they were kind and hospitable. We spent the last evening sitting on the lawn before the lit up Eiffel Tower dark, having a picnic of French bread, cheese, and wine - a suitable way to wrap-up our Paris experience.

As part of the program, our entire group traveled to Vienna for three nights. I hadn't heard much about the city before, but it turned out to be a bastion of history and culture. We took a medical history tour of the city, guided by a mysterious man in a full plague doctor outfit complete with the beaked mask who turned out to be our professor. It was hilarious to see heads turn our way in surprise and confusion as he lead us on our walk through the city. We went to the Joesphinum and later the Fool's Tower, both old medical facilities that were now museums full of ultra-realistic wax models of the body showing different organ systems and diseases in great detail. These were previously used to train medical students, and occasionally showcased to the public to blow their collective minds (many of these figures weren't exactly modest or entirely pleasant, to say the least). I particularly enjoyed our tour of the crypts beneath St. Michaels cathedral, which ended up looking exactly like the.stereotypical catacombs in videogames and movies. With coffins lining the cool, damp chambers with dirt floors concealing thouadands of remains and enormous stacks of bones in the alcoves,  I half-expected a skeleton to pull itself out of the ground at any moment. There were also several bodies which had been naturally mummified by the conditions within the crypt, and we were right up close and personal with them. Later we attended a string quartet concert in a church of all places, whose acoustics uniquely complemented the classical music. We went out as a group a few times and had a full Viennese meal with plenty of white wine and Wiener schnitzel (Wien is the German name for Vienna). It was a nice city to explore, and on my own I saw the House of Music, the museum of crime and the Viennese Museum.

Of all the European cities I've been to, Amsterdam is definitely my favorite. The entire city is built at sea-level and has a spiderweb of canals everywhere. It looked like what I thought Venice would be before I visited it in a previous trip to Europe. Strips of land dense with buildings, narrow streets, and alleys were separated by long, open canals edged with cobblestone roads and spanned by dozens of bridges. Huge palaces and buildings that might as well be palaces could be seen from almost any major street. Further from the city center were large parks and open spaces which were incredible. I particularly enjoyed Vondelpark, a large park filled with bike lanes, gorgeous landscaping, and people grilling food, celebrating, or otherwise just enjoying the nature. I spent most of my time wandering the city on foot and later on a bicycle that I rented. The city was incredibly bicycle friendly, with generous bicycle lanes everywhere and often entire dedicated parallel streets complete with lane lines and traffic signals. I'd confidently guess that half of the area of paved roads in the city were for bicycle traffic. With these accomodations and everything so flat and close together its no surprise that cyclists far outnumbered cars. Bikes were parked absolutely everwhere, and I even saw multistory bicycle parking garages with thousands of racks mostly full. I saw the infamous Red Light District which was possibly the strangest place I've ever seen. It was a nice part of town like any other and was dotted with bars, cafes and stores as usual. Between these more normal establishments were hundreds of windows and glass doors on the street level where very scantily clad prostitutes would stand in a glow of red light, posing and beckoning passerbys to come in. There's even a large church in the middle of it all, a place of worship surrounded by redlights, working girls and drugs. It was an incredibly bizarre place, but also had a strange air of normalcy and other than the obvious moral objections did not feel sketchy or unsafe at all. It would seem that the Dutch ideology of bringing such vices out of the criminal world and into legal regulation works well for them.  Overall, visiting Amsterdam was an eye-opening experience in some ways for sure, but beyond its international infamy it was an amazing city which I will certainly be going back to some day.