Next up on our trip was a visit to....AUSTRIA! [Not be confused with AUSTRALIA..haha]
January 11th:
This was mainly a day of travel. After waking up and eating breakfast, we packed up and then headed out to the train station where we hopped on a train to Vienna. *Insert uneventful, long train-ride here.** After checking in at our hotel, our class had a group dinner together. We ate at a place called “Lucky Chinese.” I split some teryaki chicken, fried rice, and some veggie rolls with my friend Kristen, and I gave Jasmine tea a try as well. A word of advice: don’t try it unless you like the taste of floral soap in your mouth...because that’s what it tasted like... :-/ I drank all of mine, but I don’t think I’m very likely to get it again...after dinner, I walked around for a little while with a few of the others, and then turned in for the night--it was a long day of traveling!
January 12th:
After waking up and having breakfast at the hotel, we had discussion groups again. Following discussion groups, we had a little free time to kill, so I took a nap and then did a little shopping with some of my friends. After, my class made our way over to the Freud museum. This was where he lived as an adult, and where he practiced for the majority of career. Sadly, the infamous couch was not there. However, we found out that we were going to be seeing it later on, so we weren’t too bummed. Besides, there was original furniture from the waiting room that he had in his house, and that was pretty neat to see! After the museum visit (drumroll please), I went shopping...I just want to make a quick note and let you know that, whenever I say I went shopping in any of my posts, I didn’t always buy something...I did a lot of window shopping! I promise that I didn’t go crazy with my shopping! :D Anyway, back to business. After shopping, my friends and I grabbed some dinner and hung out with some of the others. Not too long after, my friends Anna and Ryann and I went out to explore the city for a while. The main buildings we saw were the Town Hall, the Parliament building, and the Opera House (although we saw a cool church and a theater as well). After our adventures, we decided to call it a night.
January 13th:
After starting up our day, our class went to tour a Jewish Synagogue and Museum. I’ve toured a synagogue before for one of my classes at Bethel, so I didn’t really learn a lot of new information. However, the neat thing about this synagogue was that it was the ONLY synagogue in the city to survive World War II. This is because it was tucked away within a complex of apartment buildings. The Nazis found it and destroyed the interior, but they weren’t able to actually burn the place down (because of the surrounding apartments), so that is why it survived! After seeing the synagogue we made our way to the site of a few Jewish memorial sites and a Jewish museum, and then we went just relaxed for a little while. Our next activity for the day was a visit to the Viktor Frankl Institute. Frankl was a Jewish Austrian psychiatrist born and raised in Vienna, and was taken to a variety of concentration camps, spending the majority of his time at Dachau (which we visited while we were in Germany). Surviving the war and his experience in the concentration camps, he went on to write a book in about nine-days time. Called Man’s Search for Meaning, it went on to sell millions of copies. We had to read the book for our class, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. He was a very wise man, and I really like his ideology. He came up with a school of psychology called “logotherapy,” which is now considered one of the three Viennese schools of psychology. Although it’s not really practiced today, it’s definitely one of my favorite schools of psychology that I’ve learned about so far! I really enjoyed going to the institute, and learning more about Frankl. An interesting thing to note is that his widow still lives next door to the institute--I wish we could have met her! Following our visit to the institute, we made a brief stop at the University of Vienna. It was quite a place, and very different from Bethel, that’s for sure! After that, we went back and got some dinner, and then headed in for the night.
January 14th:
Today was a day of adventure! After waking up, having breakfast, and having a group discussion, one of my roommates, Joy, and I decided to head out to a small Austrian town with some of the guys on our trip. One of them, Dietric, had stayed in the town for a while with a missionary family I believe. He wanted to go back to the town to eat at a restaurant he had loved, so we decided to go with. The restaurant we ended up going to was called Schnitzel-land. (No, that’s not a joke--it really was called Schnitzel-land...lol.) Honestly, it was really really good! I had chicken schnitzel sandwich, which was basically a thin piece of breaded and fried chicken on a bun with lettuce and mayo. It was quite delicious! Dietric got a HUGE chicken schnitzel and ate it ALL. It was unbelievable, and we were all highly impressed. :D After our visit to the town, we decided to visit Schonbrunn and visit the famous palace. We just walked around the grounds, but it was still beautiful. After getting back to Vienna from our adventures, Joy and I decided to go shopping on our own for a while. I ended the night with dinner, packing, and then relaxing.
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