Biosciences Bonn: It's Vienna Good Time!

After the rather uneventful week of studying in Bonn, it was time for our first big program excursion to Vienna. That day before leaving for Vienna was one of the more busy days. I don’t think I got back home until 11PM, which is actually one of the earlier times that I’ve been home. In the perfect world, I would have gotten home, taken a shower and immediately gone to bed to get those 8 hours of sleep. Of course, none of that happened as it was supposed to. In fact, I, along with the rest of the students in the Biosciences Program, hadn’t packed yet or even done laundry for that matter. It was going to be a long night, and our taxi was supposed to come pick us up from our house at 4:20AM. Do I hear an all-nighter coming around?? 3 hours later, I finally finished packing. It took a while to figure out which set of clothes to bring and which not to bring. OH. And trying to guess what 17 pounds feels like is actually quite the challenge! Anyways, I ended up going to bed at about 2:30..2 hours of sleep is plenty right!? I also set 15 alarms ranging from 3:30 to 4:00 so that I would be able to wake up and catch the 4:20 taxi. I laid down and immediately passed out. Well, the next thing I know is that Kyle walks into my room and goes “Hey Kendrick. It’s 4:40.” My immediate response was “You mean 3:40 right?” And then it dawned on me that my cell phone had a thousand notifications, the alarms were going off on it, my German phone was ringing..OH, and it was 4:40 Apple time. JOY. We were 20 minutes late and missed our taxi. One of the missed calls I had was from another student who was on the same taxi with us. I called her back and asked, “What do I do? Is it too late to make it to the bus stop?” She told me no; the taxi just arrived at her house and that they would be back outside of our house in 3 minutes. So I hung up, and we immediately changed clothes and just grabbed what we had packed and ran outside. Yeah, I’m kind of freaking out at this point and just extremely embarrassed that this had happened. It turns out that the taxi had actually waited outside of our house for 20 minutes, and finally, he decided to pick the other students up. I guess we got lucky that he hadn’t been too far away when we finally woke up? The whole ride over to the bus stop, I just kept thinking to myself..oh my goodness; are we still going to make it? Do we need to meet them at the airport instead? And worst of all, I thought to myself….I hope that I didn’t make the other students in the taxi with Kyle and I miss the flight because they didn’t do anything wrong. Well, we got to the bus stop, and fortunately, the bus was still there. So that was an extremely eventful way to start off the Vienna excursion…hopefully this situation doesn’t happen again later in the semester! I slept through most of the hour-long flight. We got to Vienna and went straight to the hotel. After we dropped our stuff off, we got breakfast downstairs and proceeded to meet Dr. Schnabel for the city tour. It was a cold day in Vienna, and after 30 minutes of standing outside in the cold, I realized “YUP. I’m wearing at least 2 layers everywhere. I’m even going to double layer my socks (apparently that’s a thing that everyone but me has been doing this trip……….).” Finally, Dr. Schnabel showed up; he was wearing what a traditional physician during the Black Plague would wear: black robes, a black hat, and a black mask that resembled a crow. I’m not sure if it was just me who thought this, but oddly, Dr. Schnabel reminded a lot of Dr. Wasser by his mannerisms and actions……maybe they’re related? He showed us around the central city area of Vienna. We saw St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the center of the plaza, Hofburg Palace, and several monuments/statues and learned about the history behind many of the buildings in the area. I enjoyed the tour, but by the end of the 2 hours, I think that I can speak for almost everyone else…we couldn’t feel our toes or our fingers whatsoever. I kind of felt like if I tried to move my fingers/toes too much, they would just pop off like they did in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie…yeah it’s just one of those things that crosses my mind haha! We finished the tour of the city, and we were let loose for a few hours to look around. Just about everyone rushed to the nearest coffee shop to find warmth. I tried the highly recommended Viennese hot chocolate drink; it was pretty good! When we came out of the coffee shop, the most magical thing happened. IT SNOWED!!!!!!! To my non-Texan readers, you’re probably thinking “and so what?” but to the Texans, we all know how often Texas snows, and by often, I mean once in 7 years, we see slush. It was still cold, but all of us made exceptions and took photos with the snow. Later that day, we went to the catacombs below St. Michael’s Church. It was spooky and jaw dropping at the same time. Never before had I seen catacombs, so this was very neat, but at the same time, it was quite spooky to walk so close and see skeletons of the deceased. After that, we went to dinner! We ate at the Gulashmuseum. I ordered a meal that had goulash from beef filet with potatoes served in a copper pot. My oh my, it tasted so good!! The next day, we went to the Narrentum, which is continental Europe’s oldest building for mentally ill patients. It was a neat circular building; apparently, the idea was that if a patient got loose, regardless of where he or she ran, they would eventually just end up back to where they started. ß NEATO! After we finished the tour of the Narrentum, the biggest, baddest, craziest, most legen……..WAIT FOR IT…….dary snowball fight in the world took place. I mean, come on; we’re Texans who have seen snow only a few times in our life. It was bound to happen! We all reverted back to being 5 years old for those 15 minutes; I’m sure every person that walked by thought it was odd to see 19-20 year olds throwing snow at each other. Soon after, we split ways with the rest of the group. For lunch, we went to Der Wiener Deewan, which was a “pay-as-you-wish” Pakistani buffet. Yes, you heard that right. Pay as you wish. I know what buffet is, but I didn’t know how much the price was. I kept asking everyone..soo is this buffet like 7 Euro? 15 Euro? Soon, I found out that it was literally what it sounded like. You pay the amount that you feel the restaurant deserves. It’s actually quite a neat concept; I have yet to see one of these in America! After that, we went to the Hofburg Palace museum. There were tons and tons of plates at the exhibit. I think they devoted about 30 rooms to just plates. Plates. Plates. Plates. Just when we were about to leave, we saw another part of the museum, which was about the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (otherwise known as Sisi), so that made the museum a lot more interesting! That evening, we went ice skating, which was tons of fun even though none of us knew how to ice skate for 5 feet without falling on our booties. However, at the end of the night, there was a casualty. Our good friend, Alexa, fell wrongly on her ankle; she laughed the entire night, but she could not put any weight on it whatsoever. We thought that maybe it just rolled; a week from then, we found out that she had broken a bone in her leg. Even after finding this out, her composure never changed. She stayed cheerful as always and remained the life of the party! Prayers to Alexa; we hope you get well soon!!! The next day, we stopped by the Josephinum. Emperor Joseph II founded it to educated physicians and midwives for civil and military service. It was a very neat museum with over 1,100 wax models of the human anatomy! Then, we went and had a group lunch at Unibräu; I got the Cordon Bleu. Guess what? IT WAS ALSO SO VERY GOOD! Soup and dessert were also ordered, so afterwards, all of us were just exhausted and ready for a nap haha! Next stop: Sigmund Freud’s House! Dr. Wasser gave us a lecture about Sigmund Freud; based on the amount of information that Dr. Wasser knew about Sigmund Freud, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had told me that he had found a time machine and relived every moment of Sigmund Freud’s life. Later that night, we went to a classical quartet consisting of a 2 violins, a viola, and a cello in St. Anne’s Church. I was in band in high school, so I had played classical music, but other than that, I was never extremely fond of classical music. However, this concert was quite relaxing and nice to listen to! Last day in Vienna! L We went to the Spanish riding school. The horses there are extremely disciplined, so I understood why everyone held such high respect for this riding school! Afterwards, we stopped by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which was one of the art museums in Vienna. There were so many things to look at; an entire day in the museum wouldn’t have been enough! Because we were on a time crunch, we spent an hour there and headed out for lunch. Because of my perpetual craving for sushi, we went to Natsu the Japanese restaurant (known for having the cheapest sushi in town) that Dr. Wasser had told us about. We had to get it to go, and we literally ate sushi with our hands/chopsticks while walking through the streets of Vienna. Yes. We are truly Americans haha! Our last stop was the Museum of Natural History, which was extremely large and filled with artifacts of all sorts. AND THAT’S A WRAP FOR VIENNA! What an eventful few days that I’ll never ever forget! Next stop: Prague, Czech Republic!