Czech Republic

Here's another high saturation edit. I noticed that in the original shot, the winter lighting had made it quite grey, even greyer than it was in reality, so I figured this edit would be the antidote.

Here's another shot of Josefuv Dul from a location close to the dam I pictured earlier.

At one of the pubs overlooking Josefuv Dul, there's a pile of rock (I don't know whether natural or human-made) which is topped by an observation tower, or maybe a better word would be a perch or overlook, as there is no "tower" per se other than the rocks. I struggled to the top of it in the ice and snow, and shot a few photos, but none of them were as spectacular on film as in real life. I don't mind this shot, though.

On this Josefuv Dul trip, in addition to the snow on the ground, we also had a lot of snowfall while we were there. It was so heavy that, as you can see here, it obscured visibility somewhat, although since we were dressed warmly it really wasn't unpleasant, but part of the fun.

There was so much snow on this hill that even after I had this photo developed it wasn't immediately clear whether this Trabant 601 was on blocks, or simply held in place by blocks. As on careful inspection you can see the tread of the right front tire, it is in fact held on the hill with blocks. Yes, I know that I normally avoid car pictures, but I make an exception when it's something special. There aren't too many cars like this in the U.S. :-)

Jumping ahead, this was on the final leg of my trip back to Prague, the day following my departure from Cardiff, and with a completely different camera, my Zeiss-Ikon Contina LK that I took to Swansea. I shot this just after we crossed the border at Decin, as you can clearly see Decinsky Zamek up on the castle mound.

Usti nad Labem also has a castle, Hrad Strekov, which dates to the beginning of the 14th Century. The bridge of sorts in the foreground is actually not the famous Usti nad Labem bridge, but a sluice gate on the River Labe called the Strekovska Zdymadla.

This was one of several photos I shot of the landscape and sky on my way to Kutna Hora. I tried to pick the two best ones, so I chose this one.....

....and this one. The main difference between these shots, as far as I can tell, is that this one has this weird effect created by the blurred tree in the foreground.

I shot most of my Kutna Hora pictures on Ektachrome, and from the look of how grainy these shots are, grainier than any slides I've ever done, I'm assuming it was Elite 400, although I seem to remember it being 200. I really doubt that 200 could look this bad, though, at least at full resolution. Oddly, the main reason I'm not posting more of these is that most of them are going to end up in an NRHS slide show sooner or later. They're the main shots I have of this trip, so I'm hoping that the story and the subject matter will be more important than resolution....

This is the Easter Market that was sort of my excuse for going to Kutna Hora. It was recommended, in fact, but the downside was that it was so crowded and disordered that I was unable to see most of the usual sites. That's the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin in the background, which I did get to peek inside of, but I never found the Sedlec Ossuary, or "bone church" where the interior is covered with fixtures made from the bones of plague victims. The Easter Market itself had some decent Czech food and beer, though, and I did get to spend a day walking around and seeing what I could see...

Easter is probably a more important holiday in the Czech Republic than most places, particularly in comparison with the United States, and many of the traditions are different. The junk food tradition, though, is not. Any Easter market will have large quantities of Easter pastries and candies, with stands like this one. This photo looks alright now, I think, but it was shot with the same bad film as most of my other Kutna Hora photos, and this one was not only grainy originally, but discolored, possibly from bad developer or fixer.

Here's the train that I took home. Worth noting in this photo is the ad on the side of the train, for a movie, Gympl, which glorifies grafitti vandals who trash trains. It's typical of the kinds of self-defeating ads that public transport services accept, and begs the question once again of why they're tolerated.

Here we're making our stop in Olbramovice. This station was newly rebuilt at the time due to the considerable corridor reconstruction over the past 2 1/2 years on this line, but given that the yard doesn't appear to have been redone at that time it's likely a lot more has been done since.

I just spotted this shot going through this particular roll of slides, and decided to include it simply because I like how it looks. The fact that snow was still on the ground in late March illustrates that, even in the global-warming era, rural Bohemia still has proper winters.

This was when I arrived in Tabor, where I had been a number of times before riding through, but had never noticed the size of this station. It sort of looks like a minor through or even branchline station that's been multiplied in length, and maybe that's what the architects intended in order to save money. Tabor is actually a terminal station and a junction, however, as the line the Bechyne originates here, commonly referred to as the František Křižík Electric Railway. This line happens to be the oldest in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, being constructed in 1903, but more on that in a moment...

Named after the church of the same name on Mt. Tabor, where Jesus is said to have revealed his identity as God's son. The original Church of the Transfiguration is long gone now, having been demolished in the 12th Century (a new church, the third to stand on Mt. Tabor, was built in 1924, and still exists today), but this church, in Tabor, Bohemia, was built in circa 1480-1512, and rebuilt in Baroque style in 1677. The church tower is open to the public, although the tourist information I've found says that you have to climb 250 stairs to get to the top.

The Stara Radnice, or Old Town Hall, is another of the architectural attractions of Tabor, having been built in 1521, with two reconstruction projects in the 17th Century (when it was rebuilt into Baroque style) and the 19th Century (1878, when it was rebuilt back into Gothic).