Here's a small novel about Vienna

Fair warning, this is a long one. Due to the slowest wifi in the world at the hotel, posting while in Vienna was not an option. So here comes everything we did there condensed into one post, except I'm not condensing anything. So day by day, here we go.

Day 1:
Things started pretty early for me, somewhere around 5:30 AM. But then I snoozed my alarm, just like Dr. Wasser said I would. So I woke up in a panic again at 5:50 thinking it was like 7 AM and I had missed everything before I realized I was still fine, just a little short on time. I flew to gather my things, shower, and get dressed before bounding down the stairs at around 6:10. The only issue was that somewhere along the way my host mom had thought that I told her I needed to leave on the 6:30 tram as opposed to the 6:47 tram, and so as soon as I got downstairs she told me I only had 5 minutes, so I panicked some more as per usual. By the time I was halfway through stuffing toast into my mouth, she realized that she had gotten the time wrong and that I still had 10 minutes. Classic. So, I finished breakfast and needless to say I made it to the train station to meet the group with plenty of time. Someone had to be late though, so Nick and Jope (Joseph, I realize this is the first time I've mentioned him by name, that's his German name) took on the role of being late, showing up 15 minutes late but still managing to catch the bus with all of us. We made it to the airport, flew out with no issues, and found ourselves in Vienna fairly early in the day. After a quick stop at the hotel to drop off all of our things, we went back out for a tour of the city featuring the wonderful Dr. Schnabel who was definitely not Dr. Wasser (I'll post a picture of him here). Dressed in plague doctor's clothing, he lead us through all of the highlights in the area before we ended up at the Sigmund Freud Museum. From there, Dr. Wasser returned in some sort of magical way and Dr. Schnabel was no more. He gave us a wonderful tour of the Freud household, and afterwards we made our way to a group dinner at "Gulasch Museum" which was actually not a museum but just a pretty regular restaurant with really good food. I sat with Carter and Juliette (again sorry for this being the first time I've mentioned many people by name but they're in photos) and we split an excellent bottle of white wine, ate plenty of food and dessert, and laughed much more over dinner than I have in a while. After dinner we attempted to quietly make our way back to our rooms and probably failed at stille-ing our foxes. (German phrase for small children meaning be quiet) Because we had to do a listening assignment, we tried to get together and get through them all, which just about half worked. We listened some, told stories and laughed a lot, and by 12:30 or so we decided to call it a night. Day one in the books.

Day 2:
For once on this trip I was actually able to sleep in just a little bit, and I woke up at 8 AM, got ready and went to breakfast at 9. I ate more bread than any human really ought to on any day, including these delicious chocolate chip filled roll things that were amazing. After stuffing myself as much as possible and enjoying a cup of coffee, we headed out from the hotel to start day 2. After a bit of a trek, we arrived at the Josephinum, a medical facility and campus built by emperor Joseph II in 1785. We got a good history lesson of the museum from our guide, and went on to explore the wax anatomical collections housed within the museum. Let me tell you, I nerded out so hard seeing those. The timing couldn't have been better either since I just finished anatomy this past semester, so I was able to look at the models and actually pick things out. The models were unbelievably accurate, from the papillary muscles and chordae tendinae perfectly depicted in the heart to the lymphatic system shown all over a male specimen. Making it all the more impressive is that these models were made by artists, not anatomists. All the anatomists could do was tell the artists whether or not it looked correct, but it was ultimately the artists who made the works. This was evident in the positioning of some of the pieces, where the person would be sprawled out in a Christ-like manner, or women specimens would be depicted as Venus. I honestly could have stayed in those rooms for endless hours staring at all the pieces and their incredible detail. However, in case you haven't noticed yet, endless hours are not something we really have here, and so we were forced to leave relatively quickly to move to the Haus der Musik, home of the Vienna Symphony. Unfortunately, we were once again short on time, and so the incredibly interesting information around famous composers such as Beethoven, Strauss, Vivaldi, Haydn, and Mozart had to be compressed to maybe an hour and non-stop movement. That being said, we still hit all of the highlights, including discussions of famous works such as Mozart's The Magic Flute and it's impact on the opera genre. After making our way through all of the exhibits with some serious speed, we left the Haus der Musik and went to Kapuzinergruft, a crypt that houses members of the family Habsburg. The cool air in the crypt was welcome, but the sarcophagi were what really stole the show. These were definitely not your standard tombs or coffins, but rather ornate pieces that seemed like works of art as much as they were places to hold dead bodies. One especially evident case of this was the sarcophagus of Maria Theresia, a monstrosity in size that weighed around 2 tons, but with decorations that rivaled any cathedral I've ever seen. This theme carried on for about another 30 minutes or so as we did our tour, before finally leaving the crypt to go listen to a lecture by Dr. Wasser at the Freud house. After our lecture, the evening was ours to do with what we wanted. So, after stopping by the hotel to drop things off, we made our way back out into the city to try to find food. My group ended up consisting of me, Alana, Juliette, Carter, Hailey and Kathryn, and as per usual with us it took almost an hour to decide on food. That being said, once we did decide on a place the food we had was fantastic, and once again I had an excellent meal and great conversation with equally amazing people. We may have laughed a little too much and too loud for the locals, but nobody seemed to hate us too much. After leaving at closing time for the restaurant, we made our way back to the hotel, hung out together some more in the hotel room, then called it a night to try to get some sleep for an earlier day 3.

Day 3:
The usual breakfast affair kicked things off on Thursday, albeit slightly earlier since we had to leave at 9:15. Our first stop on day 3 was the Narrenturm, an old insane asylum built in conjunction with the Josephinum I mentioned earlier. A large, round building, it was one of the first buildings designed specifically for the mentally ill. Nowadays, it is used to house the anatomical collection of the university. It's worth noting that while it's function as an insane asylum has ended for some time, it was still in use as offices until 1993, which is pretty creepy. At any rate, the collection it houses now is simply astounding. While the Josephinum had wax collections, the Narrenturm has real specimens that have been kept for hundreds of years on a number of different ailments. In addition, they have moulages of skin conditions and other pathologies that couldn't be collected in specimen jars, leading to an impressive collection of things to look at and marvel over. Our tour guide gave us an excellent look through most of the major pieces (the exception being the lungs and chest of a person with situs inversus which was inexplicably missing...) including skeletons of siamese twins conjoined in various fashions along with adult skeletons of persons with Ricketts, an especially crazy thing to look at since the skeletons couldn't have been more than 3 or 4 feet tall but were of a 25 and 19 year old. After having our minds blown for a little while by all of the fascinating specimens, we went to lunch. Because that's clearly what you do after seeing the Viennese equivalent of Bodyworlds from hundreds of years ago. Lunch was delicious and filled with more hilarious stories and laughs, along with some great tales from Professor Waltz who decided to sit with our little group on this lunch occasion, a welcome addition. After lunch we were "free" to do what we wanted for the afternoon. Free gets quotes because we needed to be back to the hotel by 7:30 PM dressed for the concert that night and dinner was on us, so after you counted back for the shower we would need before getting ready, and the dinner we would need before that, and the fact that it was already like 1:45 when we were done with lunch, we realized we had like maybe 3 hours. No worries though, we put our time to good use. We made our way back to a palace we had seen in the center of town along with Stephansdom, the giant cathedral in Vienna. We went to the cathedral first, ducking in shortly to look around, snag some pictures, and head out. After making our way to the palace, we found we could take tours of the silver and porcelain collections of the imperial family and look at the old living quarters of the palace where Maria Theresia had lived, which seemed pretty neat given how much we were learning about her, so we went for it. Man oh man, did they have some serious plate collections. I mean I think my target plates are pretty sufficient, so seeing entire rooms filled with plates as I listened to a british man with an aristocratic voice talk about "traditional Baroque style" was quite the sight. Not only were the plates truly gorgeous, but they had sets for every possible event you could think of. The tour of the living quarters that followed was filled with more history and british accents, and while it was incredible visually, I'm not much of a history buff so pretty soon I was just wandering through the rooms instead of listening to the audioguide. It was free anyways. Still, I learned quite a bit about Maria Theresia and how she was quite the depressing figure despite her magnificent living quarters. After our tour session was over, we made our way back to the hotel, got ourselves all cleaned up and snazzy, and headed out with the rest of the group to the quartet. I do love music, so I was pretty enthralled. I was not disappointed (despite some key issues in the beginning of the first piece) and loved getting the chance to listen to such famous works in a Baroque era church. I mean how often do you get to claim that? Anyways, after the concert we went as a group with Professor Waltz to a nearby pub to grab a drink and hang out for a bit. More laughs and good times ensued, with Waltz making an appearance at each table to talk for a bit in order to see all of us. Unfortunately for me, I'm basically like a 60 year old when it comes to staying out late and I'm not a huge drinker, so after 45 minutes or so I made my exit with some of the others who were ready to call it a night, and the 5 or so of us went back to the hotel to get some sleep. Except I'm a bit of a workaholic so when I got back and found emails I needed to deal with and TMDSAS stuff I needed to review, I stayed up for another two ish hours to accomplish various tasks that probably could have just waited until morning. So I can't stay up at a bar, but put some work in front of me and I'm good for another couple hours. Figures, huh? Anyways when I saw everyone else getting back from the bars I decided to call it a night since they were all asking why in the world I was still up working when I had said I was going home to sleep. So, at around 2:15, I called day 3 complete and went to sleep.

Day 4:
Day 4 started in the exact same manner as day 3, with the only exception being we brought all of our stuff down to put in a shed while we went out for the day since we were leaving that afternoon. The only item on the agenda for the day was the Natural History museum, so we made our way over at around 10. Once inside, we got our tour guide and started to make our way through the museum. Now, while I may not be a history buff, I do like natural history, so I was pretty pumped (especially when I saw the dinosaur area cause those were the bomb when I was like 6-10). We started things off by seeing some ancient gold pieces that are of rather unknown use, but man are they old, so that's always a sight. Afterwards, we went and looked at old figurines of humans, one of which is known as Venus Von Willendorf, a fat little woman 29,500 years old. In the same room was a dancer figurine that was slightly more contemporary, but equally impressive. Strange to see works like that from people that were our ancestors from such a crazy amount of time ago, especially when I stop to think that that was the height of their civilization and now I'm typing out a blog post on a machine that has only existed for 30 or so years and yet has more power than almost anything we've ever had in the past. Not to get too philosophical though. Anyways, after seeing the figurines we made our way over to the animals like the mammoths and stuff from that period, but all I'm eyeing is the dinosaur section, so I'll admit I was a little distracted here. Finally, we head to the dinosaurs and it does not disappoint. To be fair, most were reproductions and not actual bones but I mean come on it's still dinos and they're pretty cool. They also had an ancient turtle, a massive thing that Dr. Wasser especially loved as he has spent a good deal of time working with modern turtles. He was right though, seeing an ancient turtle like the one they had (which was actually the original in this case) really shows just how little turtles have changed over the past 65 or 70 million years. After our dinosaur tour was done, we made our way upstairs to look at stuffed specimens, including a dodo bird which is always a funny one to see. After all of this, the tour was officially over, and technically our free weekend began. After a short spiel by Dr. Wasser and Henning, our program coordinator, we were on our own. Unfortunately for me, Hailey, Juliette, Carter, and Miguel, our bus to Prague didn't leave until 6:55 that evening and it was right around 12:30 when we were done. So we had some time to kill. We went and ate some lunch before bidding the people who were leaving for Prague before us goodbye and then set out to find something to do. Then we decided that we were actually just pretty tired and didn't care that much about doing stuff, so we just found a nearby park and slept on some grass and hung out for a few hours. Finally, we got up and decided to make our way back to the town so we could get some food and be closer to where we would need to go to get our bags again, and we  stumbled upon a restaurant that claimed to serve American food and couldn't resist. They were liars. But that's ok, the food was still pretty good and it gave us a good laugh to see a place imitating an American restaurant abroad, and afterwards we got our bags and headed to the bus station. After some gelato and sitting around, our bus arrived to whisk us away to Prague, and I waved goodbye to the city of Vienna. Not too bad of a town if I do say so myself. Probably my favorite city I've visited thus far, and that includes Prague. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to go back there, because I would genuinely love it. That being said, Prague is it's own post, and I'll try to post that one shortly. Hopefully I didn't lose anyone in this long post, but trust me Vienna needed all of this.