#utstudyabroad

Next stop:  Parque Natural Quebrada de Macul

We arrived back from Croatia with very little trouble. All of us were happy and spent from an unbelievable beach weekend. Monday morning class came a little too quickly but with some wine and gelato from Café de l’Europa in Stephensplatz we all survived.

Tuesday- we had a short visit to Saint Peter’s Church right next to Stephensplatz after class and a concert later that evening. The concert was for the bands Team H-Town and Astronautilis. One of the advisors for our school facility (IES Abroad) is a rapper for Team H-Town and invited us to come watch their show.

*Check out Team H-Town on Facebook or Spotify for info and music: https://www.facebook.com/teamhtown?fref=ts&ref=br_tf 

The weekend was a class planned field trip with the entire group of 30 students, our professor and some of the IES Abroad advisors. We would be going to Geneva, Switzerland to see CERN (the European Center for Nuclear Research), take a lake Geneva Tour, and visit the United Nations.

Before we took off that afternoon we had a visit to the Schonnbrun Palace in Venna where Maria Theresa and the imperial Hapsburg family lived. The 1,441 room Baroque palace is home to beautiful furniture, art, royal family relics, and many more treasures. Also on the grounds are acres and acres of gorgeous hunting ground-turned gardens and an exotic zoo. We only had a few hours to explore before we needed to pack up and leave for Geneva. This was unfortunate for one could spend days exploring and learning on the Schonbrunn grounds and still never tire of all the beautiful scenery outside and interior decorations on the inside.

This past week, the U.S. flag began flying over the country's embassy in Havana for the first time in 54 years.

This summer, UT Austin made history by sending the first study abroad group on a program to Cuba.  

The four-week program brought the students from Havana to Santiago as they explored Cuba's cultural and political history and future through architecture, art, film and media.

The group of 19 Longhorns experienced firsthand how the once-embargoed country is changing now that relations between Cuba and the U.S. are normalizing.

A Thousand Words: Bone Church

My class visited the once flourishing mining town of Kutná Hora, about an hour drive from Prague. When I heard we were visiting the “Bone Church” there, I assumed there would be a few bones displayed in the chapel, maybe some pews for worshipping and possibly some stained glass windows. Well, that was definitely not the case.

Before the Bone Church was constructed, the cemetery in the town was a popular place to be buried among aristocrats in the 17th century. Then, when the graveyard ran out of space, old remains were dug up and used to decorate a nearby chapel, using bones from an estimated 40,000 people. The bone-adorned church is supposed to symbolize the fate of death – to remind people that it will happen to everyone someday.