Sorry it's been so long since I've updated my blog. It's been a crazy week. I can't believe that I only have 4 days left on this trip then I'm headed back to the good ol' USA. It has gone by fast and slow and it's definitely had its ups and downs.
Last week was our last few days to be in Vienna. We started the week with visiting the Military museum which probably would have been better with a better tour guide, but we've had super good luck with fantastic tour guides so we were bound to have a bad one. We also went to see the Hundertwasser Haus which is an apartment building that looks completely different than every thing else in the city. I'll post pictures later when I have better Internet. The next day we visited the Austrian Parliament and the United Nations. Then our last official site visiting day we went to Melk Abbey and Mauthausen.
Melk Abbey is a monastery in Melk that is huge and is also a secondary school but it's not the main site I want to talk about. Mauthausen is a concentration camp about two hours away from Vienna. In my academic journal I reflected on this site for 3 pages (compared to my usual paragraph) so I'll do my best to keep it short. 100,000 people died at this camp. But this one wasn't like Auschwitz which was intended for mass murders. It was a work camp where they worked the prisoners to death instead. They made the people mine stone and build their own cam then they began selling the stone to other cities. Even some of the curbs in Vienna were made from that stone. As we went through the camp with our guide I could imagine things that has gone on. I could picture people living there and working there so vividly that it was kinda scary. But this site definitely made our group solemn and we soaked a lot of information in. There were other groups there that were being loud and laughing and i couldn't understand how they could act like that knowing what happened at this place. But people can do what they want to do I suppose.
Saturday we all shopped and I bought a few souvenirs and I now have a complete outfit from Vienna. :) Then Sunday we toured the Opera House and did a little more homework then we were free. Our train left on Monday night to head to Rome so we had yore a bit of free time that weekend but it was well deserved.
Now I'm in Italy and I have a lot of writing to take catch up on so I will blog about Italy later. :)
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