Poland and Austria

I am currently sitting in a coffee shop in Vienna drinking a cappuccino and listening to the German speaking Viennese people sitting around me. If you had told me a year ago that I would one day be sitting in Vienna looking out at the street cars going by I would have told you you were crazy. But I am here now and I am loving every moment I have here in Europe to soak in this culture. This has been a week of high highs and low lows. In the past ten days I have visited concentration camps, Holocaust museums, art museums, wine cellars, castles, coffee houses, outdoor food markets, small towns and large cities. I have felt both shame for humanity and amazement at the beauty humans have the ability to create. At Auschwitz I found myself pondering over and over again how humanity could have let a thing like the Holocaust happen. I could not wrap my mind around the number of people that were killed by other human beings. I could not understand the mass destruction. However, only days later in Vienna I looked about the work of some of the world’s greatest artists and found myself speechless at the beauty I was encountering. This trip has taught me a lot about humanity. We are capable of incredible things, but we must be careful to make those incredible things truly incredible.