Monday, April 15, 2013

The "Other" Castle

If there is one thing the Czech Republic has in spades it's castles. You can hardly swing a dead cat without hitting one. They aren't just in Prague, they dot the countryside with staggering regularity. In fact there are only two castles in Prague. So, basically a city with the same geographic size as Rio Rancho, NM has the same number of castles as the entire state of California. I'm going on the castle at Disneyland and the Hurst Castle, I'm not even sure those really count. Both the castles in Prague are nearly 1000 years older than California, as a state, let alone Disneyland. You'll find a lot less fat people at the castles in Prague too.
Anyway, while the Prague Castle is beautiful and a great place to hang out it does get crowded from time to time. Now that spring is upon us like an overnight-success boy band many of the royal gardens at the Prague Castle are open to the public again. I have future plans to visit them, it is still a bit early for them to be in full bloom. The beer gardens on the other hand are blooming quite nicely.
So, for a nice wander around I've taken to visiting Vyšehrad. It was the first castle built in Prague and is on the other side of the river from the Prague Castle.
Think of Vyšehrad, that's pronounced Vish e hrad, as a large park on a hill perched atop ten-meter thick walls. On any given day there are a few dozen people wandering about the walls and taking in the view. It seems it is mainly Czech people walking their dogs, taking in the view and indulging in a teen-aged cheap date. There is a nice church in the middle of the castle, seems like a recurring trend, and it has a pretty amazing cemetery full of notable professors, writers and composers and such. Antonin Dvorak is buried there. I think there is some sort of gallery and a permanent museum exhibit of medieval stuff. I'm not sure, I've only ever walked around I haven't gone in anywhere.
Vyšehrad isn't exactly high on the tourist list of stuff to do. It's not that difficult to get to, but you do have to walk a bit to find it. It isn't like you could hop off the metro and follow a throng of people and end up there. The metro is the easiest way to get to the castle, but I'd recommend taking a tram to the Albertov stop and walking through the neighborhood, ironically called Vyšehrad, up the hill to the castle.
The view of the river is much better than the Prague Castle and so is the view of the Prague Castle.


See, the view of the river really is better. I really had no idea Czechs were so into rowing sports. There were dozens of rowers out on the water training with some sort of club or team. Strangely enough, even though I just mentioned the better view of the Prague Castle from Vyšehrad I haven't taken a single photo of it from that vantage point. I mostly wandered around the park and cemetery. I do good work in cemeteries. The first time I visited I took my camera, the second time I stuck with my phone and Hipstamatic app. It shouldn't be difficult to tell which is which.


This is pretty close to where I took the photo of the rowers. There is a nice little spot through the door where you can look out over the river and take in the view.


I wonder how long this building has been around this pump. I don't know if it is the oldest pump house in the city, but I imagine it's a pretty old well site. There are some older well sites around the castle as well. There is also some rotunda from the 11th century on the castle grounds. And a beer garden, did I mention there is a beer garden there? It's not a shock, there is a beer garder pretty much everywhere. If you count a table on a sidewalk that is too small to support foot traffic as a garden, which they do here, gardens are everywhere.


Like I said, I spent most of the time wandering though the cemetery. This is the lock on the gate, evidently they lock it. I have been there an hour or so after the posted closing time twice and it's still been open.


You don't need to lock everything in a cemetery with steel. A simple shoelace was enough to make sure the graves of the monks buried there are not disturbed. There are also a lot of nuns buried there. I suppose if you dedicate your life to God and wear a wedding ring because you are married to the Lord you at least deserve a good final resting place. I can support that.


I really like that the few cemeteries I've been to here have a DIY maintenance vibe. Of course I think that is for small things like grave decoration. I think the larger responsibilities like mowing, hedge and ivy trimming and making sure damaged graves are repaired falls on no one. The light on these watering cans was great the first time I visited and again the second time. 


These watering cans were across the alcove from the group of the others in the first photo. At least people return them to the same general area when they are done using them. There is even a spigot nearby. How helpful.
It seems that on a lot of the graves I've seen it is common to build a cross out of rocks, or buckeyes as I've also seen. I tell myself this comes from the Jewish tradition of putting a rock on someone's grave, but I really don't know much about Jewish tradition so I might just be saying nothing. The light was really nice when I saw this grave and its rock cross. I couldn't not photograph it and it is one of my favorites.


The next time I went back someone else had done the same thing on a different grave. I told you it was common.


The execution maybe isn't as awesome as the first, but I'm pretty sure when it comes to stuff like this it really is just the thought that counts.


Many of the graves I seen in Bohemia have capstones, I'm pretty sure that is what they are called. A few of them even have huge bronze rings on them. I suppose they are about 25% so it's easier to lower the capstone in place and about 75% for decoration after the nice patina has set in. This one was green like an old cannon.


There were a lot of graves with busts on the headstones. Perhaps this makes it a "real" headstone since there is a head on it and all. In this cemetery it was more popular than the other few I've been to. It's kind of nice and a little creepy at the same time. Do you not feel well and call  your family and say, "I feel crappy. Get the priest for the Last Rites, the undertaker for the funeral arrangements and the bust maker to take an impression of me before I go." Or is it something your family decides to do after you're dead and so something like what we see here is the result of a casting of some sort. Sorry, but being called in to take a mold of some dead person's head must not exactly be a sculptor's dream assignment.


The more I consider when these busts were made the harder I try and figure out if the person was alive when a mold was taken. Do dead people have wrinkled brows? I don't know, I've never considered it. I don't go to a lot of open casket anything. Open bar, always. Open casket, not unless there is an open bar next to it. The first photo does look like a mold taken from a corpse, this second one I really don't know. I do like how the guy in the back right gets to look at a pretty killer mosaic of Jesus for the next eternity hundred years or so.


I told you the bust was popular. It was good enough for Jaroslav here and those other two dudes on the left. But now I'm more hung up on the process of making the bust and it is making it a bit difficult to appreciate how popular this process is.
As I go to take a few hours and figure out this bust conundrum I will leave you with a nice photo of that church I was telling you about in the castle. It's the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Broken?

A few weeks ago I went to use my favorite 20mm f2.8 lens and noticed something didn't look right when I peered through the viewfinder. The edges of the photo were not in focus, but the center was. It looked a little bit like an aura. Something I was not familiar with until I started using anti-depressant medication a few years ago during some tough times. Needless to say the doctor who prescribed that medication told me to stop taking it immediately.
Anyway, I was disappointed that my favorite lens was broken. The center-focus issue made it unusable, I thought. So I looked around for a camera shop that can repair it. I found one. Then I decided to wait for a little while and see what I could do with this "broken" lens.
I'm not strapping it on every day, but I'm taking it out now every once and a while to see what I can do. My first trip was to an old city cemetery.
The place is called Olšany and I got lucky with really nice light the day I went with my broken lens. I think I wandered around for three or four hours contemplating my mortality and thinking about how the graveyards in the U.S. are so much different. I'm pretty happy with the results. It seem I do some pretty good work in cemeteries.
Anyway, there are a lot of photos for me to stick in here, so I'll stop with the copy. Remember, if you're not a person I know I own the copyright to these photos and don't authorize anyone to use them without permission.

This headstone is not here anymore. I went back a week or so later and it was gone.

 This one is pretty close to my favorite. The light is great and the soft edges really work.

There are a lot of benches near graves. Most of them are placed so people can sit at the end of a grave and rest. 

There are a lot of crypts built around the cemetery this one isn't in such great shape. The back wall is missing.

There is a ton of bent and broken iron around the place. I guess rust and the elements do a number after 150 years.

No stopping progress. Actually that's not true, in some countries the IMAX theater would be built on top of the graveyard. For all I know this one is built on top of at least a few graves that were placed outside the walls.

I wasn't sure if I like this one better in color or black and white. I did like the pauper's grave feel to it though.


See, black and white looks pretty good too.

Iron isn't the only broken this in this place. There are a lot of broken and overgrown headstones. And check out my cool Golden Mean composition.

People even leave flowers on graves for people who have been dead for 100 years or so. It's nice.






I'll end it with another bench. I think I like this one more than the other one up there. I have other photos I like too, but 15 is enough I think. I'm not that upset with my broken lens anymore. I'm still going to get it fixed through, just not this week.

I forgot to add this one I really liked. I like the clearly hand-made wooden cross in a bucket of flowers with a computer-printed headstone on it. To me this is was the best grave in the whole place. Simple and right next to a pretty large monument to someone else. I think it makes a good juxtaposition. 

Sunday, March 31, 2013

In the Wienerwald

With these writings I try and stay away from the "take this train to get to this place" kind of travel writing you can find nearly everywhere. Why bother with that, if you really want to find out how to get someplace there are tons of sources available on the internet.
That being said, I also realize that there are a whole lot of places that are a bit less traveled and might take a little work to find. I think my trip to Hinterbrühl outside of Vienna is such a place. Rather than only write about my experience in Hinterbrühl, I'm going to tell you how I traveled there too.
My main goal was to visit Seegrotte, Europe's largest subterranean lake. I guess you could call it a man-made lake, since it is in an old gypsum mine and there would not have been space for the water if people had not removed the gypsum. Also, there was some sort of explosion or something that caused the mine to flood. There were too many man-made causes for this lake to call it "natural."
The Seegrotte was also a manufacturing facility for the Heinkel HE 162 Salamander Volksjäger jet fighter. The Germans used the mine to build parts of the plane and assembled it someplace else. The Allies tried to bomb the facility, but didn't have any success. When the Germans left they destroyed it and it was restored to be a tourist attraction. Tours run all year long.
I started from Vienna and my first step was to make my way to the Bahnhof Meidling train station and catch an S-Bahn commuter train to Mödling (pronounced something like moodling). The ticket cost me €2, not bad for a 15 minute ride out of town. The S-Bahn trains to Mödling leave about every half hour or so for most of the day. Once you get to the station you will want to look for the bus stops for the 364 or 365 bus to Hinterbrühl Seegrotte. The bus stops are the closest ones to the station and have the numbers of the busses that stop there right at the top. You buy a ticket from the bus driver, so don't worry about trying to get one from the ticket counter. The guys at the counter don't speak any English anyway, so it was a bit of a struggle for me to figure out I could just pay the driver on the bus. The bus ticket is €2.
I honestly don't remember how many stops it is from the Mödling station to the Hinterbrühl Seegrotte bus stop, but the signs for the busses will tell you, just count. The busses aren't like the ones in Prague which announce the name of each stop before you get to it, so if you are like me and forgot to count how many stops you were suppose to look for you need to keep an eye out. The trip takes about 15 minutes or so and the name of the stop is Seegrotte. When you get off the bus you will be in Hinterbrühl.
After you get off the bus keep walking in the same direction as the bus. You will cross a river and come to a street going right. There will be the Seegrotte Cafe across the street from you. Turn right on that street and walk a little ways and you will see the Seegrotte entrance on the left.
Tickets for the tour, there is no other way to get in, are €9 which is a pretty good deal. The tour takes about 45 minutes and includes a boat ride on the lake at the end. My guide gave the tour in German and English, he was a nice guy.
The film The Three Musketeers shot a few scenes in Seegrotte and they seem to be pretty proud of it. A few of the set pieces are still there.
If you go in the summer time take a jacket. The temperature in the mine is a consistant 9 degrees Celsius, which was nice for me because it was warmer than the snowy Hinterbrühl day outside. Another thing to take along is something to wipe your camera lens with. The mine is fairly humid and it can fog up a lens pretty fast. I had a few problems with this and finally removed my haze filter and kept wiping my lens down with the bag for my sunglasses.


This is the entrance to the mine. You have to walk about 500 meters down this to get into the place. Be warned the ceiling for this tunnel is about six feet high, so if you're like me you will have to duck for the walk in. After you get into the mine though the ceiling opens up.


Here is a shot of the tunnel from inside the mine. Looks pretty much like an old drift mine. There really isn't anything ground breaking about it, pun completely intended.


One of the first things you get to see is a mock-up display of a miner from the early 1900s. It was just too cheesy not to photograph. I'm also not certain miners in the early 1900s wore hard hats, I think what they had was more like baseball caps you could attach a lantern to.


The next thing you can peek at is the miner's gallery. This is where they took their breaks and stuff. I don't know why they just didn't go outside, the gallery is only about 600 meters from the exit. This room, we were told, is a balmy 12 degrees Celsius all the time.


There is a lot more to this mine than you will be allowed to see on the tour. It's for the best really, getting lost in a mine is no pic-nik and is really quite dangerous. Still it was neat to see all these other doors into darkness.


The mine includes a shrine gallery with shrines to the patron saint of miners as well as a few memorials to deceased miners. As you can see the roof opens up quite a bit after you get inside.


Here is a better photo of one of the shrines.


This is the mine's chapel. It's called Santa Barbara's Tunnel and is pretty large. According to the tour guide there are services here from time to time which are lit entirely by candle light. Seems like it would be pretty cool to see.


Before you get to the lake there is a display showing some of the parts for the HE 162. There is also this old model of one on a stick.


This isn't the lake. This is actually a small pond about 14 meters above where the lake is. They have it well lit and it's pretty so here's a photo.


To get to the lake you have to descend these stairs. The rails in the middle were used to haul the fuselage for the planes out. The rails didn't exist before the Germans arrived to make planes. At the end of the stairs there you can see the lake. If you look at the top of the photo you can see the HE 162 display. It gives you a good sense of how far below, or not far below the lake is.


When you first get to the lake you are greeted by this set piece from the Three Musketeers movie. It's a movie I have not seen, but I trust them. Why would the guide lie about that?


You get on a boat and the guide steams you around the lake. It's a pretty short trip, but still pretty cool. The boat is electric and doesn't make any noise, which is nice. The guide turns lights on and off as you travel along and is very nice to point out the "beautiful water reflections." The reflections make the water seem a lot deeper than it is and at first it was a menacing site until you figured out what it was. The guide also mentioned several times that the level of the water is 1.2 meters. No one should drown if they accidentally fall in. I bet you'd get hypothermia in a heartbeat though.


Here you can see the factory floor under the water. It's just like any other flat, concrete factory floor. It is still pretty impressive to think airplane were made in here.

After the tour I wandered around the town for a little while and took a look at just how small it is. There really isn't much there. It is in the heart of the Vienna Woods though and is quite pretty. It also seems there aren't a whole lot of poor people living in the village. After my wander I decided to visit the Seegrotte Cafe. This was a great idea. I had a HUGE latte and the largest plate of schnitzel on earth for something like €10. It was a really nice cafe with a great staff. There were locals coming and going the whole time I was there and I'm guessing it was pretty much the only game in town. People would just pop in, have a coffee or a beer and split. It was a really homey feeling place.
From the cafe it's a sort walk down the road you walked in on to get back to the bus stop. I timed it just right, completely by accident, and bus 364 pulled up right when I got there. I paid the driver €2 again and then caught the train back to Vienna for €2 and still had time for more sightseeing in town.
So there you have it: an easy trip to a great part of the country and the whole thing, transport, meal and tour cost less than €30. I think there is some good hiking around the Vienna woods in the summer, so if you go then you could make a whole day of it.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Back to Vienna

Well, I had to make a trip back to Vienna to collect my visa from the Czech embassy. They can't just mail it to me because it has to be attached to an empty page in my passport. I must say it is interesting, probably because I've never had a visa before. Basically, my passport now looks like it has two identification pages. The visa page is laid out the same at the main id page and has all the same computer type codes. I will have a complete post on how you can get your own Czech visa if you want, so be on the lookout for an "International Scavenger Hunt" blog post.
For this trip I visited the Vienna military history museum, or Heeresgeschichtliches Museum for short. I don't expect you to try and type that into Google, so I've made the name a link so you can get more information if you want. Everyone who knows me knows I love my military history. I frequently wow people at parties by explaining that the Battle of Letey Gulf was the last time anyone "crossed the T." I've made that a link as well, because I want you to keep reading without falling asleep.
As a military history buff the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum didn't disappoint. Granted, it's mostly about Austrian military history. There are various displays about other countries, but they are there to show the adversaries. The World War II section was particularly impressive and not like any of the glorious "look how we kicked Jerry's ass" museum exhibits you see in the U.S.
I want to start at the top with the museum, even though it covers the history of the Austrian military from somewhere in the 1600 to about 1945 there was one section that blew me away. The Franz Ferdinand exhibit really impressed me to no end.

Maybe it's because I like cars and I like history, but this is one of the most impressive cars I've ever seen in my entire life. This is THE actual car Ferdinand was assassinated in. You could try to argue that seeing the limo JFK was riding in at Dealey Plaza is almost as profound, but you would be wrong. Countless millions died in World War I which resulted from what happened in this car. Very few cars have been involved in events that changed world history like this one. There is even a bullet hole in it, look above the rear wheel. For the record, the Associated Press defines the time of assassination as when a person is mortally wounded, even if they die later. Lincoln was assassinated at the Ford's Theatre, even though he did not die there. I really can not think of a more historically-important automobile. I invite you to write a comment if you can think of one.
The exhibit didn't end with the car. Why would it?

Here is Ferdinand's blood-stained uniform. It might be vomit, or a combination; I've been in Prague a while so I've seen a lot of both on clothing. I'm pretty sure it's blood. The hole next to the collar on the left side of the photo, Ferdinand's right, is where the fatal bullet entered. I'm pretty sure that is what the sign said. I took a photo of it and will translate it and make an edit if I have to. To me, the car and the uniform were worth twice the €6 price of admission to see.

Then you have three of the guns used in the assassination and the grenades the killers really wanted to use, they are up there at the top. If you're under 18 and or haven't taken a world history class; do yourself a favor and click this link it will explain everything.
Honestly, the only things I think I've ever seen that are more historically significant are the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and The Constitution and they are all in the same place. Cut me some slack though, I've on been in Europe for five months or so. I know there are way more important things to see. I would have to say this is right up there with Bull Run for me, but a little more intense. In one instant, in the back seat of this car, the world changed forever. I know some parents who can tell their children that too, but it's not really the same.

Here's a close-up of that bullet hole, in case you missed it.
Since we're pretty close with Frans Ferdinand and everything I'll jump right in to some of the WWII display. It was in a seperate wing of the museum and included some cool stuff I didn't photograph like a Kublewagon (Volkswagen Thing) and an Air Force Will'y Jeep, which was a good restoration but not as cool as Little Audie.

In my last Wien post I showed photos of Flaktum, or flack towers. Here is a flack cannon, a baby one. Big brother is a bit more intimidating:

Imagine those towers topped with these nasty pieces of AAA darkening the sky with flak and shaking the ground firing as fast as possible. If you look behind the large cannon, you will see a example of the damage flack can do to an aircraft.

This is a half-track and it's just really cool. I'm not sure why it has or needs a front wheel, but I'm also not a 1930's military vehicle engineer. I first saw one of these in the film Saving Private Ryan and thought it was awesome. That is why I took this picture.

This photo doesn't really do a great job of showing the almost certain possibility of the driver's clothing getting caught in the track mechanism but it does do a great job of showing that the guy driving it was seated tightly between two huge fuel-tank bombs. I also get the impression that having some of the controls between your legs made things difficult. There were also foot controls for something. Still, I really just included the half-track photos because I think the vehicle is cool.

This is an Enigma Machine. It was the Nazi's coding device. Really, it's a laptop running just one program. No one was able to break the codes this thing created until one of these machines was captured. I'm pretty sure the film U-571 was all about how the U.S. captured a German U-boat carrying one of these things and changed the course of the war. The Heeresgeschichtliches Museum has two of these things. Maybe they use them to send secret messages during parties. They are both complete with instructions.

And what WWII museum exhibit is complete without a Nazi paper lantern? Pretty much all of them but the one at the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum as far as I've seen.

Do the Fatherland proud and hang your Nazi lantern high. I don't know, it's just weird I think. Maybe they sent them to Japan. Many people associate paper lanterns with Asian cultures.
From about 1750 on there were a lot of guns. Actually, they had some muskets from the 1600s and they looked like they were just beastly to use. The person shooting them actually had to have a stand for the front of the musket to rest on. I'm not surprised, the things look like they weighted 50 pounds at least. I know one guy who could shoulder fire one, but he will remain nameless.

This is a detail photo of the "sights" from an early 1700s flintlock "sniper" long gun. I first tried to call it a rifle, but this was a smooth-bore gun. Soldiers of today have it easy compared to this. I honestly don't know weather you look through it, or put in on the Pope's head. I think part of the size was to help protect the shooter from the huge flash that came when you fired the gun, but I really can't say. I can imagine using it though and I know I'd never hit a dang thing. I never hit anything anyway and that is with good, modern sights.

Then I saw this bad boy and fell in love. This is a 38 "kaliber" pistol. That's right, not .38 caliber but 38 kaliber with no period. The sign underneath this gun showed only question marks where a date was supposed to be. It should be sometime in the late 1700s. Think Revolutionary War time frame. Understand, this isn't a blunderbuss where you take the nearest thing with some mass and cram it in the barrel. This is a calibered weapon, somebody actually made a lead ball to shove in this thing. People in the U.S. who don't like guns say the Founding Fathers meant muskets when they wrote the Second Amendment. Well, this sucker was made right around that time, so the Founding Fathers must have meant something like this. Aside from the fact that it must take at minimum 500 grains of powder to fire I want one. This makes a .50 caliber handgun look like a toy for young girls.

You can see the rest of the display here. Those other guns look downright tame compared to that 38. I bet you'd never need to shoot it. I think just brandishing this thing would be enough to scare pretty much anyone away. Of course with how short it is I bet you couldn't hit anything farther than 10 feet away. And reloading, come on if you hit a person with this, you don't need to reload. When your bullet is the size of a person's fist it has some stopping power.

There were "modern" guns in the museum also. Everything Austrian military seems to have stopped about 1945. I wonder why. This was one of the coolest gun exhibits I've seen. It is one of the first repeating rifles used by the Austrian Army, sometime around 1898. I don't think I've ever seen and actual cutaway of a gun like this before. They even cut the bullet in half, although that is black powder in there and this type of bullet didn't use that, but anyway. I suppose sawing bullets in half is a bit dangerous and you have to make due. Safety over accuracy is something I can get behind here.

Not to put too fine a point on it (pun completely intended) but humans have been killing each other with pointy things for a lot longer than they have been with guns. These are bayonets from the late 1700s because when it takes 2 minutes to reload your gun you don't want to be caught defenseless. These things are nasty and most likely killed more people than the guns they were attached to. They aren't the worst blades in the museum. There was actually a whole display of Turkish weapons. Evidently the Austrians and the Ottomans weren't friends.

See, I told you there were nastier things. These spears were labeled something "spiken." All I know is I would not want to be at the business end of one of these. If you survived a hit from one of these it must have taken months to recover.

The Heeresgeschichtliches Museum claims to have the largest collection of cannons in the world. Most of them are outside and it was cold and they were in a cage thing and whatever I got lazy and didn't photograph them. I was at the museum for four hours, cut me some slack. I did however photograph this mortar. It's almost a cannon and it was inside where it was warm. As a side note, check out that floor. It was creaky as all get out, but really cool.

If you're going to hurl lead from a tube you might also want to have something you can hurl from a man. These are early grenades. You took a hollow ball made of iron, or glass there in the back; filled it with powder, shoved a wick in it and hurled it at your foes, or dropped it on the ground and ran like hell. I think I read somewhere that more grenadiers were killed by their own weapons than by enemies. After seeing these I know why.
That is pretty much it for the important things I have to say about the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum. If you're interested I've been pasting Heeresgeschichtliches Museum into the text, because it really is a bastard to type. Anyway here are some fun photos I took too. The tank garden was closed until next week, bummer.

 

There were a lot of dolls in the museum. Some where small, some large. I liked these. It also turns out Austria had a navy. From the exhibit they had a navy for a long time. I still can't figure out why a landlocked nation needs a navy, but I'm a small-picture kind of guy. There was an exhibit of mannequins wearing Austrian navy uniforms and I really liked the light. It was a bit eerie, so I will leave you with that.