Sorry for not getting a post up yesterday. I got back rather late and it was either write this for an hour or call my friend and talk to her on face time. I chose to reconnect with her. So that's why this post is a bit late.
Anyway, we had to be up and ready to leave by the time 9 came around. All our bags had to be packed and placed away in the garden house that the hotel had in the back. Our first adventure of the day was to go to the Freud house museum where Dr. Freud talked to various patients and tried to psychoanalyze their thoughts and underlying problems. It was interesting to walk through his house and see not only where the Freud's lived just before they fled the Nazis to Britain, but to see the various things that Freud collected. There was even a collection of Freud's grandson Lucian, who was a painter that tried to incorporate his grandfather's psychoanalyzing methods into the way he painted, trying to strip away the physical attributes to get to the true person beneath. Needless to say, a lot of his paintings are not very appealing to they eye at first glance. We had some time to just look through the house after our guided tour was finished. Once that time was up, we went downstairs where a presentation on Freud and his life was given to us by our professor. It went through the theory of the different parts of our consciousness and the various people that Freud knew throughout his process of coming up with this theory.
After this lecture we had a bit of free time for lunch before we had to meet up to go to the natural history museum. I wasn't that hungry, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to eat dinner that night because we would be on a plane and needed to eat something. We stopped at a pizza place and I split a pizza with my good friend Kelsey. While we were there, all of our professors came in! We seem to be following each other around inadvertently throughout the trip, but it was cool to see them and know that the place we were eating at was good. Just as our pizza came out, two of our friends walked in and sat by us. We spent our lunch talking with them about our trip, and then we left to get some snacks for later. Well, not me because I wasn't hungry at all, but we still went to a store to get something.
We met up with the rest of our group at the hotel and made our way to the Natural History Museum. There was this small Elephant out front that we all took a picture on before making our way into the museum. As we waited to get our tickets, Dr. Wasser pointed out the Venus sculpture poster nearby and started singing the "I like big butts" song because his presentation on the Venus sculptures had the song as a background. And really, these sculptures used to be seen as beautiful, but they really do portray rather large and robust women. We took the your through the museum, starting with the precious stones, making our way to the Venus woman, then traveling through the fossils until we got to the dinosaurs. There were so many rooms! I swear we didn't even look at 3 of them filled with stones before the Venus statue, and right beside the statue was a "bouquet" made of gemstones and silk. We briefly stopped in the meterorite room and did a simulation on what the danger would w if various meteorites crashed into earth at different speeds. There was the (real) bones of the largest turtle discovered yet, and a life sized model of a T-Rex and a feathered Dino.
Once the dinosaurs were seen, we headed to the animal exhibit upstairs and wandered through so many rooms! There were creatures from the land, sea, trees, ground, air, anywhere you would think for animals, they had an exhibit on it. We made our way through the endangered birds exhibit, where our guide had to leave us, cutting our exploration short. We all got our coats and had about 4 hours to do what we wanted. I stayed at the museum, walking through the extinct animal exhibit (I got depressed) before finding my way to the anthropology portion that documented the way that humans became the beings that we are today. I watched a simulation of how the different species of human spread around the world, and wow did we explode once we came into being. Seriously, within about 10 thousand years, Homo sapiens had pushed out all the rest of our cousins that had made a life for the previous hundreds of thousands of years.
Anyway, by the time I left with Kelsey, we only had an hour before we had to meet to leave for the airport. As we were leaving, was saw our professors infrint of us, also leaving the museum (see, we follow each other around!). We stopped at the palace cafe for a quick drink and snack before hurrying back to the hotel. On the way back, we slipped between two horse drawn carriages while crossing a street. Only in Vienna. We made it back to the hotel and got our stuff ready to leave. One we got to the airport, it was business as usual. Well, until the security checkpoint. See, I beeped walking through the metal detector and was subject to a search for dangerous material. I didn't have anything, but it was cool to see the different devices they had to make sure that I was clean. For example, they had a shoe device so I never had to take off my shoes which was nice.
The plane back was pretty cool, and we all got back safely before getting our tickets for the bus back to Bonn. Once there, it was a quick bus back to the house where I briefly unpacked enforce heading up to bed. At this point, I had the choice to either go do my blog or to talk with my friend. And that's about it for that day.
Today (Saturday) was in eventful except for getting together with my group, so that will be a part of Sundays post as well. Beyond that, my life is literally a story right now. I just spent the week in Vienna, preceded by a weekend in Amsterdam, and on Monday we go to the university to observe a surgery. Oh, and a bunch of us are booking a cruise around the Mediterranean Sea for spring break. I absolutely love it here and I'm so excited for what's happening next.
Till tomorrow,
Erin Z
Note: pictures will be uploaded soon, I promise!
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