Pécs and Vienna!

Hey everyone!!!!! I have been doing a bit of traveling this past week so I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write anything. We took trips to Pecs, a city in Hungary, as well as Vienna, Austria. But first, we had class on Monday through Wednesday.

In class, we get into groups and are assigned a box of bones. We lay the bones out on the table to create the skeleton of the person they belong to. By analyzing the different parts of the skeleton, including certain bones, porosity, and exostoses, we can determine roughly the age at which the individual died and their sex. We can also see if they had arthritis or tuberculosis by looking at vertebrate. The skull and pelvis are the main ways to determine sex, although we have found this to be much harder in juveniles. The skeletons are all from Hungary from the time around the Turkish invasion/occupation. From our findings, it seemed life was pretty rough out there during that time. It is very interesting and I am learning a lot, as I have not taken a single anthropology class before or even anatomy so I am learning both the bones and the way to analyze them at the same time. I didn’t realize you could almost picture someone's life story just from their skeleton!

On Thursday we took a trip to a mass burial site from the 16th century during the Turkish Invasion in Mohac. It was neat to see people working on extracting the bones and brushing off the years of dirt to reveal all the bodies (although yes it is very sad as well). Pecs was also a really vibrant city that was having a light festival while we were there. I am not entirely sure of the origin of the festival, but we were able to see lights projected onto buildings and walk around with the rest of our group.

Then on Friday we took a train to Vienna! I have heard lots of great things about Vienna so I was really excited to go. We had a hostel on the top of a mountain that overlooked the entire city. We had a random roommate from Turkey and she was iconic. On Saturday, we took a tour of the Schonbrunn Palace which was absolutely stunning. If it wasn’t so hot I would have liked to frolic through the gardens. We drank good coffee and ate good food (I had 2 grilled cheeses, which they just call toast, and they were so good…….). My favorite part was probably all of the architecture, as it feels so grand and also clean haha.

Now we are back in Szeged and we are going to be back in the lab beginning tomorrow morning and work until Friday. Another note, MY BAG STILL ISN’T HERE! I had a bit of a shopping spree at the Szeged mall and have made like 100 phone calls but still no bag. I think they are getting sick of my calls because apparently someone is supposed to schedule a time to deliver my bag to me soon (at this point I don’t know what “soon” means…). But overall I have really been enjoying my time here and can’t wait for another week!