Back Home with much to tell!!

Well it has been a very long time before Brittany or I have had a chance to update this thing. As soon as we made it to Switzerland from Vienna, everything became ridiculously expensive (including internet). So anyway I will do my best to catch everybody up!

I don't know if I posted this picture above or not but its of me in Freud park and it's a statue which says something about silence and intelegence basically.

I have some many pictures (500+ pictures) so I may throw a couple randome ones in like these

Silly pictures!

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Ok so I never had the chance to write about this part of the trip because I thought it would take the most time to talk about, and it Brittany and I had been operating on limited time at the internet cafes. Anyway, this picture above is a book which we had read by Viktor Frankl(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl). He was a psychologist who had been imprisoned in a concentration camp and actually survived. In his book he shares stories about his and other inmates' lives and experineces in the camp. His theory centers around the psychotherapeutic benefits of finding a reason to live. This picture was taken before we had gone to Mauthausen Concentration camp, a camp where thousands of people where imprisoned and killed.

The pictures that follow this one are some pictures I had taken to share the experience I had at Mauthausen Concentration camp (http://www.remember.org/camps/mauthausen/mau-introduction.html).

This is the Outside of Mauthausen. (ABOVE) Whats so interesting is how beautiful the landscape is around it. I could only imagine what the prisoners felt when looking out into these fields.

The sign above is a caption for the crematorium

This entire prison was built by the inmates who had occupied it. The prison was built with large stones which the prisoners would carry up this staircase from a rock quarry below. If somebody carrying a rock fell, he would often knock down the others behind him and then a domino effect would happen, creating a big rock avalanche killing many who were closer to the bottom. When I walked this staircase I realized how hard it must have been. I had sneakers on, and I had food in my body, and no real weight barring down on my back, and yet I was still struggling getting to the bottom of these steps.

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The pictures below are at an abbey in Melk, Austria (http://www.sacred-destinations.com/austria/melk-abbey.htm). We stopped here after our trip to Mauthausen. This abbey is known for its amazing display of Baroque architecture.

While we were here, we saw one of the most beatiful churches. The paintings on the ceiling and the gold everywhere was breath taking.