Day 32 - Free day

Sleep is good! When we came back last night from the restaurant, we took showers and conked out. Our room was super hot even with the window open, so we didn't even get under the covers before we were fast asleep. We were going to meet at 9:30 the next morning, so we all decided to wake up at 8. Yeeaahh, that didn't happen. Apparently we turned off our alarm when it came on. It's only by luck that I woke up at 8:45 and managed to get my roommates up in time for the free breakfast before we met.

We met and went to the Josephinum, which is basically a museum of the things that doctors used. This includes not only the tools and books that they used, but the models that they used. These models were the main reason that we took the tour because they were remarkably accurate wax models of the internals of the human body to be made in the 1800's. Unfortunately pictures were not allowed with the wax models so all that I have to share with you on these models are my words. They had 6 different types of rooms - cardiovascular (including lymph), muscular, upper body, lower body, brain, and pregnancy/fetus'. These were the coolest models that I've seen yet, and it turns out that students were able to take out the organs and put them back in the correct position as a sort of test. That's not available to modern students though because these wax statues are really delicate, especially the thin portions. There were some closeups of the organs that really showed how they were attached or how things went into or out of the organ. The pregnancy room was really depressing and probably put the girls off of pregnancy for a few months to years. They mostly showed deformed babies or the proper way to use forceps to correct the orientation of the baby so that both the baby and the mother would live. It was really cool. After the wax sculptures, we went back to the front few rooms where the tools and stuff were, where we could ask our guide about whatever caught our fancy, and there's quite a few pictures of us just being silly and joking amongst the old vintage tools.

Once that was finished, we had the entire day to ourselves to do whatever we wanted. Me and 5 others went to get lunch at a Turkish place for their pizza, which turned out to be really good. Then we headed off to the 'time travel' museum because that sounded really fun. When we got there, we discovered that the price was over twice the amount we thought it would be and would start about an hour and a half later. We promptly turned around and left, never to return. Instead, I wanted to go to the art museum called the "Albertina" that housed a bunch of impressionist paintings. I really wanted to see some Van Gogh and Monet, so I jumped at the chance. It was really interesting to see how many small strokes with infinitesimal differences in color could make a large picture that was so beautiful and diverse. Kelsey and I eventually lost the rest of the group and just wandered the halls. On the top floor was a more modern exhibit showcasing two artists. One had two collections called "the end" and another called "eyes." She drew either the last frame of a movie or the eyes of characters just before a transition in each of these collections. At first it looked like blurred pictures, but when we got closer we saw that these were intentional. Each "pixel" was a small square of squiggles that added to the whole. We were both supremely impressed with her larger pieces because of the spatial awareness that she must possess to achieve these types of paintings.

In the other modern exhibit was some guy that did really weird paintings. I wasn't that impressed with him, and by that point both of us were tired and our feet hurt, so we took every chance to sit down or hurry through the room to the next one. As we were leaving, we remembered that there was actually a -1 floor and decided to go down their. I'm so glad that we did. The paintings down there were stamped onto the paper by chiseled wood. Now, that sounds weird, but what happened was each wood block had a different part chiseled out and when put together, created pictures that had multiple shading. The first only had the white part chiseled out and was generally a light color (think light grey). The second block had more chiseled out to leave behind the light grey and to cover all the rest of the picture that was darker (like a dark grey) This continued, each block having more chiseled out to leave the color as it was while adding a darker color until the last block only had the black outline to be pressed into the paper. It was fascinating, especially looking specifically at the details of what was being made.

When we were done looking at the pictures, we went back to the hotel. It was about 6 and we were TIRED! Anyway, we just sat and looked at strange things on YouTube and talked before our roommate Johanna came in. We shared what was going on, but left soon after to get something to eat. We walked around the corner and saw a Doner place where we decided to stop. Both of us ordered Schnitzel and waited for our food to come out. When we our food was ready, we were in the midst of a broken conversation with the people working behind the counter in German. Turns out they didn't speak English and so even though the questions they were asking were pretty standard (what do you do, where are you from, are you Turkish?) it took forever to talk with them. Oh, not because we we couldn't understand or answer their questions, in fact I was very good at that and acted as translator for Kelsey who had no clue what was going on. No, it was the fact that it took a second to hear and understand what was being said and then another second or two to figure out what I was going to say. In fact, we shared quite a bit of information relative to all the other places we've been to just because we could actually talk to them and they weren't put off by out bad German. It's good to know that whet I'm learning is actually working.

We came back to eat our dinner and Johanna had on curling from the Olympics. Soon our room was full of people who came over to watch with us, and stayed for quite a while. At about 10, one of the guys not in our room came down and rounded everyone up to go to one of they clubs that are around. Kelsey and I decided not to go not only because we were both tired, but neither of us are really into doing stuff like that (sad face, I know) and would rather get the sleep that we'll most definitely want tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a full day that ends with an orchestra concert, and I think people were planning on going out in our classy clothes, so I'll do that with them...maybe. I'm so excited to be here and to experience all the things that I've done, and I can't wait for tomorrow.

Also, sorry about the lack of pictures, both today and yesterday. Apparently it takes over 20 minutes to load just one picture because at the 20 min mark I gave up to start this post. I'll do a complete post cataloging all the picture that I'll take on Friday when I get back into Bonn and have reliable bandwidth. Sorry again to all who were looking forward to the pictures, I'm pretty upset too.

Till Tomorrow,
Erin Z