So once again, I woke up on my own later than intended. this time because I accidentally set my alarm for 8 pm instead of am. Nevertheless, we all got downstairs and to breakfast before it closed and were ready for our day in Vienna. First on the agenda was to walk to the university and sit in on a lecture from a professor on the differences of medical school education in the US vs. the European countries. It's amazing how different our two methods are, for example they go into med school directly after high school for 6 years, then spend another 5-6 years doing clinical's and their residency. they also work on a more "remember more over long periods" than the US's "cram then dump" method. Throughout the lecture we had a medical student named Nina that went around with us and brought us to our next adventure.
After the lecture we went to lunch and had a cool conversation with her on the different traditions of major holidays between our county and hers. Since Austria is a very catholic country, there weren't very many differences in our customs because I'm catholic and do the same stuff. After the whole different customs conversation, we ate and regaled her with our school population (they don't have huge schools here) and the various laws regarding guns that Texas has.
Then we went to the Narrenturm, a building that houses a lot of pathological conditions of different parts of the body. All the specimens were once living tissue that have been preserved for people like us to observe what these conditions look like. It was really interesting to see all the problems that our body can have. Most of the defects were congenital, or affected children at or before birth, and it was really depressing to see some of the unformed skeletons of unseparated twins. I think some of the girls are put off of having children forever because of our tours for the past few days.
After this little tour was a bit of free time to do whatever we wanted before our concert tonight at a church. I really wanted to get a pin for Vienna, and my friend wanted to go to a bakery to get a snack. When we shared what we wanted to do, Nina decided to join us to just pal around with us. We stopped by a souvenir shop so I could buy a pin, and even though it was a bit expensive for a pin, it was totally worth it because this has been one of my favorite trips and the value of something that will help me remember these fun times is worth the amount of money the pin cost. After leaving the shop, we started off in a random direction to find a bakery. However, Nina stopped us to bring us to one of her favorite sweets places. It turns out that we had already been to the shop to get meringue sweets, but hadn't tried any of the cakes. We all bought a small sweet and sat on the bench outside and proceeded to just talk to each other for a few hours. It was a lot of fun, and hopefully I'll actually keep in touch with her. (Nina, if you're reading this, thanks for hanging out with us today!!)
Eventually we had to leave to get ready for our concert. It was a classical concert so we had to dress up a little bit more than we were. After a bit of time, we went out to the concert at St. Anne's church for the string quartet. They did classical pieces from Vivaldi and Mozart, and it was beautiful. A beautiful concert for such a beautiful church. After the concert we all headed out our own ways, and three other friends and I went to a Doener place and shared sandwiches and a beer before heading back into our hotel.
Tomorrow we leave Austria, a sad thing for sure. This city is so welcoming and fun to be a part of, and I have really enjoyed my time here. It's an early day, but there's a lot of stuff going on, like touring both the Freudian house and the Natural history museum. I can't wait! And then It's back to Bonn to finally spend some time relaxing. I love doing all this neat stuff, but it's so tiring to be doing everything at once.
Till tomorrow,
Erin Z
Note: SORRY! I totally thought that this was set or update, but when I looked at it today, it was still a draft. This was written on Thursday.
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