More from Kutna Hora

Tom always insists on taking photos of me, and I usually delete them, but I guess I'll leave this one.


yes Erika- I'm wearing a floral sweater!!

As we were walking through the town, we heard a cacophony of bird sounds. It took a while to spot the source of the noise, but when we did, we found a nest of some sort of raptor. We couldn't tell if they were hawks or falcons, but the young ones were just about to try to fly. They were coming to the edge of this opening, looking down, squawking, and quickly moving back to the safety of the interior. We didn't see any of them take wing, but I am sure that it happened later that day!

Detail of flying buttresses on the church of St. Barbara - patron saint of miners.

Pretty!

Lots of old stone walls in this town...

Of course, no visit to Kutna Hora is complete without a stop at the "bone church". This church is actually located in a neighboring area, so we stopped there on our way home.

It's hard to imagine the numbers of people who have lived and died in Europe- thousands alone in the plague years in the 1300s, not to mention wars, natural disasters, and old age :-). What to do with all the bodies? Sometimes, the bones from previous burials were collected and housed in the crypts of churches. These are known as carnal houses or ossuaries.

Someone went a little too far with this one- besides the stacking of bones from about 40,000 individuals, bones were used to create macabre decorations for the room.

That chandelier contains every bone in the human body - not sure if you can see it clearly here.

This is a recreation of the coat of arms of one of the families responsible for this ossuary. Made from bones, of course.

Silver Mine tour

We have been having some rainy, cold weather- supposedly caused by the Americans and the Alaskan volcanic ash that has just reached our area of Europe. :-)

We decided to try a day trip anyway- and drove with our friends Jim and Mabelle to the small town of Kutna Hora. Notice that we made the right decision. We were blessed with blue skies and sunshine for most of the day! There are two major churches in this town, and we are standing at the larger of the two, looking out over the town.

Kutna Hora gained prominence in the 13th century for its silver mines, and we decided to take the mine tour that is offered. This deceptive-looking entrance leads to a short mine tunnel, not far underground, that houses displays on how the ore was extracted by hand back in the day. It seems that not only did the guilds protect miners by decreeing a reasonably short shift underground (6-8 hours), but the mining guild (forerunner of today's unions) protected the miners' families with medical care and pensions when the miner was no longer able to work.

It has been proven that humans were much smaller back in the day- which is a good thing because these mine shafts were SMALL! The working conditions in the mine were unbelievably bad- it is cold, dark, and wet underground, with water dripping through the rock. We were told that the water contains arsenic and other toxic material, and that the air would frequently be bad in the mines, so miners were fortunate if they lived past the age of 35.

After that wonderful news, we were outfitted for the REAL trip underground! These canvas coats are similar to those worn by the ancient miners, and we were supplied with hard hats and lamps.

Our tour guide spoke fluent English, but there were times when I wished that I didn't understand what she was saying. In the photo below, we are listening to her description of the hardest points in the tour- an area where the roof of the tunnel is extremely low, and another section that is extremely narrow. She told us that occasionally someone actually gets stuck in the narrow section of the tunnel, so she now puts anyone who appears to be at risk for sticking at the end of the line, because you can only go one way through the tunnel. There is no turning around to go back! She smiled as she said that no one in our group would be designated as the "last-in-line". This information, by the way, is NOT in the guidebook!


And yes, I did fix my helmet to the correct position on TOP of my head before we went underground.

Heigh-ho, heigh ho -it's down in the mine we go- and down and down we went. Our tour only incorporated the first level of the mine, but it was certainly deep enough for everyone in our group.

I'm not sure if you can see how close these walls were, and this is the WIDE part of the tunnel. In the narrow part, we all had to turn sideways to get through. Tom says this was the scariest thing he has ever done. I kept telling myself that I was about the same size as our guide, and if she could make it through, so could I! In the area with the low ceiling, even I hit my head and had to bend over to get through, so I can only imagine how the tall folks must have felt.

Silver ore is almost indistinguishable from rock by sight, so the miners had to use their hammers to determine whether or not they had hit a vein containing silver. The density of ore and rock are different, producing different sounds when struck with a hammer. There is no ore left in this mine, but the rocks and the varius mineral deposits were interesting.

We were awestruck to think that people actually worked in shafts such as these - on hands and knees- for hours at a clip.

Happily we all made it out in one piece, although the gentleman in the blue shirt is still a little shaken. He had a difficult time in the narrow section, and was extremely glad to be back above-ground.

Tea time

I don't think you'll find this in your local 7-11!!!

Beer Bus- Is this a great country or what?

If you get tired of taking regular transport here, you can always jump on the beer bus....

Well, actually not. This is a bus used at the Pilsner Urquell brewery for part of their tour. :-)

The Magic Box

Elliot enjoying a show - as Owen calls them. Taking right after Grandpa Syvertsen.

This story is for the birds

Every evening we are serenaded by very musical birds, who sing sweetly at dusk in our courtyard. It is especially beautiful because the notes tend to echo off the buildings, and I love to sit with the windows open to hear the concert.

Looking out the windows, I see mostly pigeons. I was positive that it was not the pigeons that were singing, so I went on a quest to find out what it might be.

Through reading murder mysteries based in England, I know that there are birds called magpies and jackdaws in Europe, and I have seen magpies in the courtyard. I looked them up, and their song is not very melodious, although they are a pretty black and white bird with a very long tail.

One evening I saw the songster sitting on our terrace rail, and to my surprise it was a black bird with an orange beak. Just a blackbird, then, but the song that they sing makes up for their lack of interesting plummage.

Since I had found the source of the music, I forgot about the jackdaw until yesterday. I decided to look them up to see what they looked like and whether or not they lived in this area. I read that jackdaws are mainly black with a grey neck. They are related to crows, and are very social birds, traveling in large flocks. Their call is described as a metallic and squeaky "kak-kak". I recalled that I had seen a few jackdaws strutting about in the park, and went on to other things.

Then later that evening, we heard a weird rushing noise outside-it was something we had never heard before. Rushing to the window, we saw a huge flock of birds settling on the rooftops across the courtyard. The noise we had heard was the beating of their wings as they flew in. Watching them, I realised that they were exhibiting all the behaviors described in the article that I had read earlier - they were jackdaws!

Now I am wondering what other birds are out there - time to get a bird book and some binoculars and wander through the woods!!

Strolling with Fred & Ginger

What happens when you get on a tram and you realize it is going the wrong way? You get off and walk, of course!

Long story - but I'll try to shorten it- We had to go to the Czech Inn (that's for you, Jason- still checking all occurences of Czech Inn on the I'net?? :-) We took a tram from the Czech Inn to our regular shopping mall at Andel and bought some groceries. Our regular tram line back to Dejvice has been rerouted for a month or so due to construction on the line. Someone told us it was back in service on the regular route, so we jumped on board to go home.

As soon as the tram headed for the river we knew it was NOT going the way that we wanted to go, so we disembarked at the next stop.

It was a beautiful evening, and so we decided to enjoy a long walk along the river on our way to a Metro stop.

We had to take the obligatory photo of the buildings known as the Dancing House or the Fred and Ginger building.




The river walk is quite well developed, and has benches, play grounds, a bike path and interesting sites along the way.

This is green door #7 - It made me instantly think of that great 1950's song- "The Green Door"

We then checked out possibilities for a replacement for Serendipity. This one was a great size, but needs a bit more work than we would like.

Didn't have any bread for the swans, so watched someone else feed them......

This boat coaught our eye - she is certainly a good size and has beautiful lines- but - she's a restaurant....

It was a longer walk than we thought - we were heading for the Stare Mesto stop on the Green Line......

We found a tram going our way, hopped on, and went home to enjoy Manhattans on the terrace.

I asked Tom to take the photo below because it was 10:30 PM and you can still see the sunset afterglow in the sky. Living at this higher latitude is enlightening (hahaha). The sky is light in the AM at about 3:45 now, and I woke up this morning with full, bright sunshine streaming in the window. I thought it was about 7 AM, but no, it was only 5 AM!!! We are lovin' all this light, and are trying to ignore the fact that all good things come to an end, and we'll have the opposite
to deal with in the winter.

Concert by the Charles Bridge....

What's the old saying "All dressed up and nowhere to go"? Well, we did have somewhere to go, and although it doesn't appear evident from this photo- we were all dressed up (notice no jeans!)

(and for those of you who are noticing the coats- yes, it's cold here this week)

I really wish we had a picture of the guys all lined up on the other side of this walkway, all 3 of them taking this same shot!

We hooked up with our friends Connie (left) and Bruce, and Mabelle (right) and Jim for a free rock concert that was publicized in our church bulletin. Oh yeah, it was a Christian rock concert that was taking place in a club next to the Charles Bridge.

We arrived early so that we could get a good seat........What were we thinking?

OK, you can all stop laughing now.....

Although we appreciated the talent of the musicians (some of the guitar work was really great) we couldn't tell if the lyrics were in English or Czech. (They were in English) Needless to say, we've gotten a bit old.

We did, however, see some younger folks that we knew, and this helped to advance our image as hip oldsters in Prague!