[Recap] Don't be a Wiener

So, the Vienna trip. Really, really interesting.

The first day was a little frustrating. Our plane had some sort of serious malfunction, and we had to get off and wait for a replacement, which set out timetable back by quite a bit. Fortunately, it wasn't too long, we just had to move our planned tour from the morning to the following afternoon.

Our first evening there we got to visit Michael's Church (Michaelerkirche), including the crypt underneath it. There's over 4,000 people buried in an area roughly the size of a large house! There's an entire wall where femurs, hundreds of femurs, have been stacked like cord-wood all the way up to the ceiling! In an alcove on the other side, there's a massive pile of all the little (and not so little) bits and pieces that had broken off and apart over the centuries. What I'm saying is, there were quite a lot of spooky scary skeletons. After that, we had dinner at the Gosser Bierklink, a very popular Viennese restaurant.

The next day we went to watch the morning practice of the Spanish Riding School, the oldest of its kind. Even though it wasn't an official performance, there was something really amazing about watching pure white horses moving gracefully about the arena without any effort. That afternoon we had free time, and I and a group of friends went to the Albertina Museum. One artist who spoke to me in particular was Paul Signac. I'm still not entirely sure why. I'm not really used to having opinions on art.

Day three we got to visit Freud's house and office. Lots of cool old stuff there. But for me the main event of the day was the Josephinum, a Viennese military medical school. It has a massive collection of wax anatomical models, numbering in the thousands. And because they were handmade, they weren't just models, they were works of art. Incredibly detailed, down as small as the eye can see. Then, later that night we went to a string quartet concert and listened to Mozart and Beethoven.

The last day, we went to the Narrenturm (Fool's Tower), the first purpose-build insane asylum in Europe. It has long since been converted to storage of old medical materials, including more wax models. But where the Josphinum's showed ideal men and women, the Narrenturm held examples of a boggling variety of different diseases. Not a visit for the faint of heart. After lunch we then went to the Natural History Museum, where we saw such things as the world's largest meteorite collection and the Venus of Willendorf. Fascinating stuff.

And then, we went home.

Born Depressed, Drill Queen