Thursday, May 31- Day 18:

We are beginning to wind down our stay here in Vienna. We head to the airport early Sunday morning. With today being one of our last free days we decided to do a couple of last minute things that we wanted to do from the beginning of the trip.

One of my former teachers, Coach Viera, suggested to do the basement tour of the St. Stephens Cathedral. The group and I decided to check it out and see what the buzz was about. Not knowing what we were getting into, we quickly realized that the basement was a crypt for former Bishops, church members, church officials, and other random people. This tour was super neat because we got to go through the tunnels underneath the church. We saw some urns filled with organs, bones, and skulls. One of the girls was excessively interested in the bones and dead corpses which was slightly unsettling. It was very cold and slightly smelly. We did learn that the last person that was buried there was 14 years ago and it was one of the recent bishops. This site was formerly used as a mass grave and corpses were stacked all the way to the ceiling. They had to stop using it because the smell of the dead bodies was so strong that it was unbearable to have church above ground.

After the tour of the crypt Becca, Lucas, Grayson, and I went to the orchestra/opera concert at the Schonbrunn Palace. We found out afterwards that there were nearly 100,000 people there in attendance. The concert was beautiful. I enjoyed listening to the orchestra, and I admired hearing the opera singer. We were seated in the grass on a hill quite a ways back so we could not hear all that well when people were talking and being loud towards the end. The worst part was getting home after. The train stations were so crowded that the security were letting people into the station in shifts. But we eventually made it!