Week 5: Heading East

Belvedere Palace in Vienna

This week has been my favorite week yet! It began in Vienna with a tour led by Dr. Schnabel, a real life plague doctor who was definitely not Dr. Wasser. Dr. Schnabel's theatrics and his lack of concern for all the people staring at his "work clothes" (and beak-like mask) made for a tour that no one will soon forget. I have learned about the plague in school many times  before, but hearing about it from someone who was actually there left a lasting impression, as did all the remedies we took to protect ourselves from getting sick. Some were good (Haribo peach gummies), others were bad (cloves), but the urine from the young boy was just plain ugly. No one got the plague, however, so I suppose they must have been effective.

While in Vienna, we went to some very interesting medical museums, but the one that stood out to me most was the Josephinum. This museum housed incredibly detailed wax anatomical models. The anatomical accuracy, artistry, and preservation of the models was all very impressive.

Another highlight of Vienna was going to the Gulaschmuseum. Unlike the name would lead you to believe, the Gulaschmuseum was a restaurant, not a museum, and we did not have to take a tour before we could eat. I enjoyed this restaurant because gulasch is not something that I would usually order on my own, and it was fun to try something that was so quintessentially Viennese.

St. Matthew Cathedral in Budapest

Hungarian chimney cake

We finished our Vienna excursion on Thursday afternoon and then had a three day weekend to travel on our own. I took advantage of the long weekend and our relatively eastern location to visit Budapest, Krakow, and Auschwitz. Budapest was beautiful, had great (cheap!) food, and was so much fun. It is on my list of places to go back to because one day was certainly not enough to see everything I wanted to see. One place we did visit in Budapest was the famous Szechenyi thermal baths. Unfortunately, we did not have towels and were therefore unable to visit the sauna, but it was very fun and relaxing to enjoy the warm baths. 

Sunday was a weird day. It was a day I had been nervously anticipating for a while, but also looking forward to, sort of. On Sunday, we took a tour of Auschwitz. It felt very surreal to be walking in a place where so much evil had taken place, especially when you consider that there are still people alive today who were taken to the concentration camp as children. While I am not someone who believes in ghosts, it was almost like you could feel the spirit of the people who were so unjustly abused and murdered in that very place 75 years ago. Its hard to imagine that humans are capable of inflicting so much pain on other people, but when you are standing in an old gas chamber in Auschwitz, the depth of human depravity is impossible to avoid. I definitely think that its somewhere everyone should visit once in their life if they have the chance. Human nature has not changed since World War 2. If the holocaust was possible then, it could be possible again, and in order to keep from reliving history, we must learn from it.