Goodbye

I can’t believe I get on a plane back to the states in less than 10 hours; these past three weeks have flown by. I’m already planning my next trip back to Germany. It has been an eventful last week abroad. Vienna, Austria is my second favorite place we have visited on this trip and is such a beautiful city.

The visit to Stephen’s Cathedral and the catacombs was very interesting. It is crazy that below where so many people worship there are sitting thousands of skeletons. It was creepy to see the mass graves of people who died from the plague. It is unbelievable that thousands of people were wiped out from one viruses.

Another very interesting place we visited was the wax models. They were so real and depicted the parts of the body, organs, and lymphatic systems so visibly. Although, something Dr.Wasser and the guide pointed out that was very interesting was that 90% of the models are male. The only time women are shown is in the OB section or the different parts of her body that are absent in males.

The Tower of Fools was kind of insightful, creepy, and sad all at the same time. The lady explained to us that what we were going to see were extreme cases, but even so these parts of skeletons were once upon time real living people. The part that captured my attention the most  was the first case of skeletons she showed us. There were two small skeletal bodies not much longer than my forearm. She explained that these were two sisters who were in there 20’s when they died. They had the disease rickets, which is now easily cured by vitamins. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to have lived like that, or how much pain they must have been in. Even though it was an incredibly sad place, it is also very uplifting that most of the cases no longer exist because medicine has evolved to help or cure most them.

Meeting Anna and visiting their medical school was really cool. It is so hard to comprehend that she is one year older than me and is in her 5^th year of medical school. I really wish that the U.S. would model their educations system more like theirs.