Hallo, wie gehts??

This past week in Vienna was maybe my favorite week yet of the program. The excursion I was most looking forward to on this trip was going to Vienna, so I was already really excited for this trip for a while. I will say, when my alarm went off at 3 am on Tuesday morning to get up, my excitement wasn’t really there, but I quickly got over that. Once we got to the city, we went to the hotel and then got ready to do a city walking tour. Although it was somewhat uncomfortably hot, I still really enjoyed getting to walk through the city and learn about how much the development of medicine as we know it has occurred in Vienna. One of my favorite parts was seeing the lecture hall that had such intricate and ornate painted ceilings and sculptures throughout the room. It’s mind blowing to me to think about students learning and taking classes in a setting as beautiful as one like we saw, especially compared to the way our classrooms are set up at school. I also found it really interesting to learn about the older remedies that were used to combat the plague. The craziest thing we saw on Tuesday was the mummies that were preserved in the crypts beneath the church, which really shocked me that these mummies were not even preserved this way on purpose.

On Wednesday, we went to a museum to learn about the development and progression of pharmacy over time, which was really interesting. A group of us went to get dessert in the afternoon at a beautiful restaurant called Cafe Central, and then to dinner later at an amazing Indian food restaurant. The coolest part was going to a bar after that we figured out had been visited by celebrities like Brad and Angelina Jolie, Mick Jagger, and more! The next day we went to the Narrenturm, which was my favorite of all the museums. I’ve always learned about diseases that were prevalent in past generations, but haven’t gotten the chance to actually observe what they looked like in the human body. One of my other favorite parts of the Vienna excursion was the opportunity that we had to go see a string quartet perform in a beautiful church called St Anna’s. It was such a cool experience to hear music that dates back hundreds of years played in such a picturesque environment.

I really enjoyed my time in Vienna and I’m super excited that I am going to have the chance to go back with my family in a couple of weeks! I definitely plan on showing them some of the places that we got to see during the excursion. I know that they will really love the Natural History Museum and I gained so much knowledge from the tour of that museum that I’ll be sure to share with them. We are now in the last week of the program, I can’t believe it’s all about to come to an end!