I cannot believe week five has already come and gone. It seems like just yesterday I got off of the plane in Frankfurt. This week we traveled to Vienna, Austria. Vienna was filled with beautiful architecture and some of my favorite museums. The Josephenium medical museum I enjoyed way more than I expected. Going in, I pictured different exhibits discussing medicine but had no Idea that these wax casts were going to be part of the experience there also. I think it's incredible that these wax casts are so painstakingly detailed and mostly accurate (with some different parts of the anatomy exaggerated for educational purposes). I personally think it would be cool to learn from these figures rather than a textbook. The Psychiatry hospital museum that we visited the next day was just as interesting and full of wax castings of different skin diseases, and other curious abnormalities, especially of the face. The preserved girl was probably the highlight of the museum and it was incredible how the scaled skin covered the entire body, even the face (which was cleaned/scraped for the benefit of the family). I enjoyed the natural history and Freud museums also, having a lecture in Freud's house learning about him and his teachings, while in the very place where he began to see patients was a unique and cool experience. Other highlights of Vienna included seeing the Belvedere Palace and St. Stephen's cathedral, it amazes me how detailed these buildings are and especially the Gothic styling and tiled roof of the cathedral is so ornate and exquisite, it is like every cathedral I see while here keeps getting better and better. I also like Dr.Wasser's different "collegues", Dr.Schnable made an appearance and took us on a walking tour of Vienna. During this tour, we learned all about plague medicine and remedies that they believed would work. The coolest part was that Vienna was a place hit hard by the plague at many points in history so to see significant historical landmarks, such as buildings and doctors offices where plague doctors practiced was very cool to see. 
For our weekend trip, a group of us traveled to Budapest and Krakow, with a day trip to Auschwitz. As we were sitting at the bus station waiting for our bus, Elyssa looked down at my foot and asked me why it was so swollen. I looked down and my foot and ankle were both blown up like a balloon. I racked my brain trying to think of reasons my foot was so large and could think of none. I decided to ice it and try to not let it affect my weekend. We got on the flix bus and settled in for our three-hour trip to Hungary. At this part of the trip I feel like flix bus and I are old friends, when I anticipated my time in Europe over then spring semester, never did I think that I would be filled with so many buses, but with wifi, air conditioning, and outlets, I cannot complain too much about them. We got to Budapest and found our way to our air bnb, and then ventured out for dinner. For dinner we found the cutest little food truck area with a good mix of different types of foods, they had Mexican and Hungarian and everything in between. For dessert we tried Hungarian Chimney cakes, I think I could have eaten ten by myself, and over the course of the next day and a half, I think we visited the same street vendor on four separate occasions. We also got a recommendation from two girls while at the pub watching the soccer game in Vienna, to visit the ruin pubs in Budapest. The ruin pub was very open and quite large, and a good experience filled with lots of young people and lots of tourists. I don't think I heard any other language in there being spoken other than English. 
The next morning I woke up, my foot and ankle kept getting larger, and more red. I was mostly confused and continued to ice it and elevate it, but I thought it was more important to see Budapest while I could, so again tried to ignore that it was a problem. We decided to sight see for, looking up all of the typical tourist attractions in Budapest such as Fishermans Bastillon, and the parliament building, and they did not disappoint. We traveled by foot and public transit (trying to give my foot a bit of a break) and viewed the parliament building from a hill across a river. We then headed to the famous Szechenyi thermal baths. Walking in it smelled like sulfur and it had lots of different temperature pools, similar to the Badahaus, and upon exploring we found a sauna, but forgot to bring towels, so didn't end up getting to go in. Overall the baths were a good experience and very fun, but also were a bit overcrowded and slightly touristy which was expected. 
That night we hopped on an overnight flix bus that transported us to Krakow. We got there very fast thanks to the speedy and rather scary driving of man behind the wheel, and after storing our luggage, we were off to explore Krakow. We stepped out of the train/bus station and were immediately were surprised how cold and windy it was. In Budapest just a few hours earlier it was quite warm and we were "breaking a sweat" simply walking around the city. Our first stop was breakfast, where we all ordered pancakes, which were not American pancakes but rather crepes, and our second stop was Zara, where we all purchased a coat for the day. We wandered around Krakow for the day and saw some incredible things in the old town, and I quickly fell in love with how slow paced and relaxed of a town Krakow was. There was a Catholic church on every corner, and St. John Paul II is my favorite pope to date, so I was kind of freaking out that we were in the very place he grew up and spent forty years of his life. We saw everything from St.Mary's basilica to Wawel cathedral and the hauptmarkt. For lunch we stopped to try perogies. Coming from a half polish family, I personally grew up eating these polish dumplings, but it was cool to see everyone else in the group try them and love them for the very first time. After lunch we visited a polish pharmacy or an Apteka to get an ace bandage to wrap my foot (which kept getting worse and comically large). It's important to note that all of my shoes no longer fit my foot and Sarah (who is an angel) kindly let me borrow her birkenstocks for the next two days. Once my foot was wrapped, and we (or rather I) continued to try to ignore the problem, we explored some more and then eventually tried an Italian restaurant that was recommended by Catherine's friend who lives in Warsaw. It amazed me how much food and nice wine we got for a relatively inexpensive amount even though we were at what was considered to be a nice restaurant in the old town of Krakow. After dinner we met up with some of the other girls who were also in Krakow at a piano bar and listened to some live jazzy music which was a treat. 
The next day we ventured to Oswiecim, the town in which the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (now a museum) is located. When we were on the bus headed there, I was shocked that the camp was surrounded by what looked like a very populated area, and equally confused and amazed at the people living in this area and their ability to not let this horrific event affect their future. Our tour first took us to Auschwitz I which was a smaller camp, which I learned mainly housed women. At this camp, many Jewish people died, but that number of people paled in comparison to the massive Auschwitz II/Birkenau. When walking through Auschwitz one I anticipated a more emotional response, but the only reaction I had was that I was sick to my stomach. Seeing the very places in which these people were treated inhumanely (which doesn’t even begin to describe how they were treated), was so sickening and heavy, but also is a testament to the strength and bravery that the individuals, who were forced into this camp and came out the other side, contained. Upon arrival at Auschwitz II/Birkenau, it was ten times the size of the other camp, containing over 300 barracks that housed anywhere from 700-1,000 individuals each. Most of the crematoriums here have been torn down because the Nazis feared that the Soviets would discover that it was an extermination camp rather than a work camp. Overall it was a somber day and the history here is one of regret and shame by most of the German people, and great sorrow by the Jewish people, and this museum, preserved for future generations to see hopefully will prevent this type of evil repeating itself in history.
On a much sunnier note, it is now Monday and my ankle is no longer a balloon, it magically went down ten sizes overnight. So therefore, I am hopefully that I will not be a gimp in Italy in a week.
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