AlexandraFrick

Friday, 8/29 We had the day off from class today, and it was one of our classmate's birthday. We decided to sleep in and go to breakfast once everyone was ready. This type of planning should have been my red flag that it was going to be a long morning. Kelsey had gotten a recommendation from a friend about visiting Grinzing, a winery neighborhood in the north of Vienna. Combined with that tip and the Lonely Planet walking tour through the various winery neighborhoods, Kelsey and I were determined to spend our Friday checking out Vienna's wine gardens. With this plan in mind, we finally headed off to breakfast at a place called "The Breakfast Club" which apparently served the kind of breakfast we all missed. The restaurant had outdoor seating, but you could tell by ... read more

Tuesday, 8/26 We began the day with a class wrap-up of Mauthausen. It's a rather contentious issue even amongst my own class, so we ended up spending the entire class period discussing concentration camps and the Holocaust. We talked about the surrounding city, and the idea of what they did and didn't know during the war. My professor discussed life in a totalitarian state (like the Nazi regime) and how, historically, they are important to avoid because they're incredibly difficult to come out of. I'm supposed to discuss why and how the Holocaust happened, and who the perpetrators are. However, the answer to this question, the way I see it, is far to complicated to communicate in a travel blog. It becomes more and more evident to me that the Holocaust was a result of a ... read more

Friday, 8/22 We woke up early on Friday morning to meet the bus at 8am. I planned on sleeping the entire bus ride (2.5 hours) to the concentration camp, so I brought my neck pillow and earplugs. We jumped on the bus and I promptly curled into a little ball and fell asleep. I woke up right as we arrived at the camp. Everyone was a lot quieter than normal as we walked to the visitor center. Some of us wandered over to the cafe to grab some food before our tour- scheduled for noon. Mauthausen was the main concentration camp in Austria, and overlooked 49 satellite camps. Unlike an extermination camp such as Auschwitz, Mauthausen's goal was to exploit the inmates' working capacity until they expired. There was a granite quarry on location, and many ... read more

First and foremost, I need to whine a bit about this blog site that I am using. It has a faulty saving mechanism, and if you ever see my blogs end abruptly (like there is no period at the end of the sentence) than you can assume that something got cut off. So far it only seems like it cuts of a few sentences, so you're probably not missing out on much. Tuesday, 8/19 We headed to class a little bit early this morning. When we arrived at the institute, there were a ton of other students there. Apparently other programs that study there during the school year have begun. We discussed the Napoleonic Wars, the Biedermeier era, and the Congress of Vienna. For the evening we had a trip to the opera, so I resolved ... read more

Friday, 8/15 After going out Thursday night, I came home and tried to sleep for the last portion of the night that I had left. For some reason, I was too anxious to sleep and felt like I was awake the whole night. I woke up early to make sure everything was packed for my trip. We had to meet at the Belvedere for another Dr. O tour at 10am. We took the streetcar over to the museum, and got our tickets and headed into the first exhibit. The first room we spent some time in was a display of a variety of heads with all sorts of weird expressions on their faces. The oddest part of this exhibit was the names of each expression, which were made up by a museum curator instead of the ... read more