Vienna: To much to tell!

Wow what a week! I hadn’t realized how worn out I was until I slept until 11 today without waking up once during the night.  Of course, waking up at 3:30 in the morning the day we left for Vienna may have had something to contribute to my overall exhaustion.  Vienna involved a lot of walking and a lot of museums, and we still didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all of the things there were to do!  I am not going to even try to cover everything we did (I suspect my post would end up being 3 pages long if I did) but instead I will talk about a couple of the (many) highlights and maybe I will circle back around to the others at a later date.

Stephen's Dom

I think this experience of Vienna was different from any other trip that I may take there.  First off, a lot of the places we visited were medically oriented, such as the anatomical museum and the Vienna Medical School.   While these things were definitely of interest to me, they are not what you would expect a typical tourist to visit.  Then again, we are a group of bioengineers and medical students, not exactly the typical tourist profile.   One of the things that we saw were wax models of various diseases and also anatomically correct models used for teaching medical students.  These things were so realistic! If I didn’t know better I would have sworn I was back at body worlds looking at different human dissections.  Many of the disease ones I could not even bring myself to look at as they were so disgustingly realistic.   More than ever I am glad I live in a modern, developed country with high-tech medicine and not in a time when plagues swept the world.  The artistry put into these wax models is astounding.  These models are shaped, molded, and painted down to the last detail and are even laid out in classical poses for display.  As fascinating as that is, I do not really envy the artists that were the ones chosen to detail every last pustule.

 I especially enjoyed the various lectures from European medical professionals on the schooling system in Europe (specifically Austria).  It has always been a dream of mine to earn my PhD in a foreign country, but until recently I had assumed that it would be near impossible to arrange and that most of the better schools would be in the United States.  Now I am discovering that while it would indeed be a challenge, this dream is nowhere near impossible.  I have had many a fruitless search on google that usually ended in confusion on this topic, so it was good to learn about the European system through professionals directly involved in it. 

Another event of note was the Symphony that we attended.  All of the girls got excited about dressing up and spent some time shopping, straightening our hair, and generally just being girls.  Being a former percussionist, band-nerd, and symphony orchestra member, I was very excited to listen to the music and spent the entire first half picking out which instrument was playing what and laughing to myself at the percussionist who had to wait the whole piece to play his one snare roll.  The talent of these players was astounding.  Every note seemed to start exactly together, the brass chimed perfectly, the trumpet soloist went from high to low to muted to unmuted without cracking a single note or sounding like a strangled chicken, and the first-chair violin gestured so wildly that it is a miracle that he managed to keep his seat.  Just kidding, the first chair violin was indeed gesturing wildly but it was because he was expressive in the music and it made the concert that much more enjoyable.  Seeing the performers so into the music made the concert even more fun for the viewers.  All joking aside, these musicians were incredible and I was absolutely floored by their performance.

At the Museum of Natural Histrory

Our time in Vienna came to a close much too soon, and we boarded the late-night plane back to Bonn.  Vienna was a time of delicious food, interesting museums, awesome hot chocolate and desserts, and good times with friends.  I hope that I get the chance to return one day and see all of the sights that I missed this time around.