Germany to Austria to Poland in one week!

This past week we left for our Vienna excursion on Tuesday. It was an early wake up call at 3:30am and I was still pretty tired from the Rome weekend. When we got to Vienna we had a full day planned. Although we did a lot of great things, I was still feeling exhausted until after we had the free afternoon on the second day. I was able to get some much needed alone time to explore the city. I stopped into some churches and read a book in a coffee shop for a couple of hours with a latte and a croissant. It is so easy to forget about taking time to rest while being abroad because there is always so much to see and do, but it's important to take a step back and relax from time to time. After that afternoon I was able to enjoy the city so much more! It felt weird also having to do homework while we were there; I spent one of the evenings writing my paper for VIBS 311. One of my favorite things that we did in Vienna was go to the natural history museum. I have always loved science museums and this one was huge! As Vienna was coming to a close I was really looking forward to getting to Poland. We got ready to take an overnight bus and 9 hours later we were in Krakow! Ok so that sounds really simple, it actually was more like this: we got on a bus, claimed a whole row to ourselves, laid down and tried to sleep, woke up every two hours, and then FINALLY we were in Krakow. We checked into our hostel and thankfully it wasn't as sketchy as the hostel in Rome. That afternoon we went back to the bus station to get to our Auschwitz tour. It is really difficult to put this experience into words. It felt strange to be at this place that I had heard about my whole life and to see the exact location where so much human suffering happened. It was deeply moving. The one thing that kept going through my mind was that it was really important for us to be there and see this for ourselves, I wanted more people to be able to have this opportunity. The next day I woke up early because there were some Catholic places I wanted to visit a little bit outside of Krakow. Getting to those places was a hero's journey in and of itself, google maps really confused me but after asking a couple of people I was able to get there! Getting back to Bonn was such a relief, this place has started to feel a lot like home. I am looking forward to not traveling next weekend and hanging out with people in Bonn!