Week 10

The next day we headed to the Narrenturm, the Madhouse Tower. It’s the oldest building on continental Europe used for the accommodation of mental patients. It no longer houses patients and now functions as the Federal Pathologic-Anatomical Museum. It contains hundreds of moulages, which are castings of body parts in wax or paraffin, wet preparations, dry preparations, and medical devices. The moulages depict every sort of disfigurement and disease you could imagine and all were painted at the time of their creation so the detail is very vivid. There were some extraordinarily vivid ones depicting some pretty intense diseases. The tour was fascinating and led by a very knowledgeable medical student. It had snowed the night before so after the tour we had an awesome snowball fight right in front of the museum. After some group pictures, the group split up into multiple smaller groups since we had the rest of the day to ourselves.  My small group went to lunch and then a small group of us went shopping for some shoes to wear to a musical concert that was planned for the next day. We went back to the hotel to drop off our bags and get ready for our night plans. A large group of us had planned to go ice skating at an ice rink in front of city hall called Wiener Eistraum. The rink was large and gorgeous because there were lights everywhere and the city hall was a beautiful backdrop. If I only knew the adventure I was in store for.......

First off, I had never ice skated in my life. I had never even rollerbladed before. But I’ve always been up for trying new things and what better place to try ice skating for the first time than abroad in a beautiful location? We only had an hour to skate but I was so excited. The others were naturals but I stuck to the wall so I could hold onto it. I had been aiming to only fall less than 5 times but I fell for the first time right away. Every time I fell, I was able to catch myself on the wall or more like slam myself into the wall to stop my movement. I had made it to another part of the rink where everyone was when I came to a gap in the wall. The gap was probably 20 feet wide but it was still intimidating to think about crossing it without having a wall to catch myself if I started falling. People were cheering me on so I pushed off the wall and started to glide in the general direction of the far wall. I had gotten about halfway across when my left foot started to slip and slide.