February 20

Typing that title made me realize how quickly this trip is moving! Spring break is 3 weeks away, which is crazy to me. Time flies. We returned from our group excursion to Vienna yesterday and it was amazing. I had no idea that Vienna was so pretty. The architecture and sculptures everywhere were breathtaking. I would have been perfectly content just walking around the whole city looking at the beautiful buildings all week, so the things we did as a group were a fun added bonus. I enjoyed the Josephinum and the Narrenturm, as well as the medical history walking tour that Dr. Wasser gave, although it would have been a thousand times better if the weather had not been miserable. The Narrenturm was somewhat hard to walk through, however, because as I looked at all the 3D models of all the horrible conditions, I kept thinking about the people that the sculptures were modeled after and the suffering they must have endured. It made me extremely thankful to be born in the twenty first century.

It is a little bit difficult for me to type this blog because the wifi in our house is not working so I have to use my host mom's desktop and the keyboard is different. I keep finding new things that are different in Germany than in the US. Despite these differences, I do feel at home here, and riding the train back to my neighborhood after being out of the country all week felt good. I am continuing to work on learning German, but my progress seems to be slowing down. This language is really hard for me to grasp for some reason.

This weekend is the start of a really hard week academically. I guess it is the price you pay for having a ton of fun and somewhat neglecting responsibilities for a whole week. I have been sitting at the table since I woke up this morning working on homework or studying of some sort or the other with relatively little breaks. I don't see an end in the near future. I plan on doing something fun tonight to release some tension and then hit the books again all day tomorrow and probably will not stop until next weekend. This will be a fun week, wish me luck!