this is one of the very beautiful areas in the Highlands
Alness – Dornoch Firth Scotland
Harris and Lewis – the outer Hebrides
one of the famous products from the island of Harris which is actually a continuation of Lewis, is Harris Tweed. I bought a Harris Tweed jacket in 1985 and I thought “Harris” was the name of the company produced the jacket. But it refers to handwoven wool tweed produced on the island of Harris and no other place in the world. Many products will import the tweed from Harris, create a product and ship all over the world and even back to Scotland. But the tweed needs to be certified by the association of Harris Tweed producers and therefore gets the standardized label “Harris Tweed”. Asking around I found there are probably over 200 people dedicated to weaving this product by hand.
Edinburgh Art Gallery- Scotland
I highly recommend visiting this museum in the very center of Edinburgh. It has all different kinds of art and it’s fun to walk-through.
north Shetland Islands – Scotland
Leipzig – Germany
OK, back to Germany. I wanted to stop over in Leipzig so here are some photos from a Sunday when everything is closed.
During his first years in office in Leipzig, Bach created new cantatas on a weekly basis – about 150 compositions in total. 30 more can be traced to later times. And these numbers do not include Bach’s Passions, cantatas on the annual occasion of welcoming a new city council or numerous compositions for special events. Bach also presented the works of other composers in the Leipzig churches as well as his own reworkings of some of them. The first performances of the St. Matthew Passion (1727) and the lost St. Mark Passion (1731) took place at St. Thomas Church, the St. John Passion (1724) and the Christmas Oratorio (1734/35) were premiered at St. Nicholas.
The interior of St. Thomas Church as it existed in Bach’s times has been removed almost entirely. This includes the two organs. The oldest parts of the large organ had been made in 1511. The smaller organ even dated back to 1489. Still remaining from Bach’s times are several pieces of Communion equipment, the portraits of superintendents in the choir, as well as the Löbelt cross and the baptismal font.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe
Scotland – the Picts
many carved Christian stones were erected in the British Isles between 700 and 800AD. Slabs like this one, however, are only found around the east coast of the northern half of Scotland. They were commissioned, designed and sculpted by elite members of Pictish tribes. Who were these people and what do we know of them? During the 6th and 7th centuries AD, the art of the Picts was to incise geometric and animal symbols onto boulders. In the 8th century their sculpture changed. They completely covered both surfaces of large stone slabs with carved designs, including a Christian cross. Fine Pictish metalwork, mainly in silver, has also been found but ittle else has survived. However, churchmen and poets from other nations wrote and spoke of them, so we do know something more about the Picts. These people were not invaders or incomers. They were descendants of the Celts who had lived in this country for over 1,000 years. The Picts were a grouping of small tribes living in the northern half of Scotland during the first thousand years AD. They were farmers, sailors, hunters and craftsmen who used many raw materials, including metals, wood and leather. Although we have not found Pictish farmhouses, byers or barns in Easter Ross, we know that they existed because place-names like Pitcalzean and Pitcalnie have survived.
Brochs. The large standing cylinders groups occupied.
The Norsemen came here in the 9th Century AD and gave us the names ‘Skelbo’ (‘scelbol’ – shell stead) and broch’ (‘borg’ – a strong fortified place), but the broch builders who lived here, were the people of the Iron Age. We are not sure if these stone towers were only built for defence – to keep people safe during an attack from invaders. On earlier maps, brochs were often called ‘Pictish Towers’. A Roman called Ptolemy recorded the names of the Iron Age tribes and the people were called ‘Picti’ – the painted ones. The map shows the location of all the broch sites in the north. Only a few brochs were built further south. Perhaps they were status symbols and built to impress?
all encompassing Prague museum
this is definitely one of the most fantastic museums in the world. You must go and see this. It has so many different categories of things to see it will fascinate the whole family.
One of the oldest written reports about Prague comes from the pen of the Jewish traveler Ibrahim ibn Yakub from 965/6.
Scotland – the amazing West
the west of Scotland, on toured the Isle of skye, it’s such a beautiful area and very rural with few towns so very different from any populated areas in Scotland. The driving is mostly typical two-way roads which are actually one way with paved bubbles what local cars to slow down, stop and then pass. Be careful driving there. On one side you wind up in a bog and the other side you wind up down the hill or in the ocean. But it’s so beautiful it’s worth the challenge.
Prague magic
there is an old house they discovered recently where potions and supported magic was performed especially for the King Wenceslas who some of you Christians might remember from a Christmas Carol in his name. Yes he was this king who promoted the study of health through potions and what we now call magic. The dungeons below were hidden to preserve their powers and it’s just a very interesting historical place to visit. If you find yourself in Prague make sure to go to this place and listen carefully to the very interesting stories.
Antique Transport Prague technology Museum
I don’t think you have to be in love with cars or machinery to find this museum in Prague fascinating. The reason we went, we saw a very old Mercedes which someone said was used by the Germans during occupation times in Czechoslovakia but rebuilt for private taxi purposes. He said one of the original cars that Himler used and then gave to somebody else in the German occupation force was in this museum. I think you will find these photographs of different kinds of transportation and their history kind of interesting even if you’re not a car fanatic.
The first owner of the car on display was Ellá Sternbergová from the chateau of Jemniste.
Passenger car with a water-cooled four-stroke single-cylinder engine placed cross-wise above the rear axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 3005 cc, output 6 bhp, maximum speed 30 km/h. Producer: Benz& Co., Rheinische Gasmotorenfabrik, Mannheim, Germany
Passenger car with a water-cooled four-stroke horizontally opposed twin-cylinder engine placed cross-wise above the rear axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 2714 cc, output 6 bhp, maximum speed 21 km/h. Producer: Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau-Fabriks-Gessel-schaft A. G., Kopfivnice, Moravia
So the Prague car plant had already in 1913 offered its customers, in addition to several types of utility vehicles, three types of passenger cars with four-cylinder engines – the small Praga Alfa, the two-litre Praga Mignon and a big luxury four-litre car, the Praga Grand. This Praga Alfa from the first year of production was donated to the National Technical Museum collection in 1946 by its producer.
Passenger car with a water-cooled four-stroke four-cylinder SV engine placed length-wise behind the front axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 1130 Cc, output 15 bhp, maximum speed 55 km/h. Producer: Pruni ceskomoravská továrna na stroje v Praze, automobilní oddelení Praga, Prague, Bohemia
Passenger car with a water-cooled four-stroke four-cylinder SV engine placed length-wise behind the front axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 3969 cc, output 40 bhp, maximum speed 80 km/h. Producer: Benz & Cie., Rheinische Automobil und Motoren Fabrik A. G., Mannheim, Germany (chassis) and Carrosserie V. Brozik Syn, Pilsen, Bohemia (body)
Passenger car with a water-cooled four-stroke four-cylinder SV engine placed length-wise behind the front axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 3969 cc, output 40 bhp, maximum speed 80 km/h. Producer: Benz & Cie., Rheinische Automobil und Motoren Fabrik A. G., Mannheim, Germany (chassis) and Carrosserie V. Brozik Syn, Pilsen, Bohemia (body)
Passenger car with a water cooled four-stroke vee twelve-cylinder SV engine placed length-wise behind the front axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 5990 cc, output 120 bhip. maximum speed 140 km/h. Producer: Zavody Tatra, a.s.. KopFivnice, Czechoslovakin
Passenger car with a supercharged water-cooled four-stroke eight-cylinder engine placed length-wise behind the front axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 5402 Cc, output 180 bhp, maximum speed 160 km/h. Producer: Daimler-Benz A. G., Stuttgart, Germany
-Benz pre-war production – the supercharged eight-cylinder Mercedes Benz 770. This cabriolet from 1939, which was originally commissioned for the commander of the German troops in occupied Norway, was used in Czechoslovakia after the war for the most important state cere-monies. In 1948, the Communists took over all power in the country and in a few years began to adopt an ideological attitude to automobiles too. The state cabriolet was for this reason given a completely new body in the Vysoké Mýto Body Works in 1952. On the outside, there was nothing that would remind anyone of its imperialistic origin – the car took on a new form, and for that matter the dictatorship did too.
Passenger car with a supercharged water-cooled four-stroke eight-cylinder OHV engine placed length-wise behind the front axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 7655 Cc, output 230 bhp, maximum speed 170 km/h. Producer: Daimler-Benz A. G., Stuttgart, Germany (chassis) and Karosa, n. p., Vysoké Mýto, Czechoslovakia (body)
Passenger car with an air-cooled four-stroke vee eight-cylinder OHC engine placed length-wise behind the rear axle and with rear-wheel drive. Engine capacity 2968 cc, output 75 bhp, maximum speed 160 km/h. Producer: Tatra, n. p., Koprivnice, Czechoslovakia
For a long time there was a lack of equipment for fighting fires that would meet the two basic requirements – to be of significantly greater efficiency in fighting fires and to be quickly transportable to the site of a fire. A more serious fire could not be put out by straw or canvas buckets and primitive hand sprinklers, and so in the past fires that broke out as a result of small acts of carelessness often even destroyed whole towns. It was as late as the 18th century that the first horse-drawn mobile fire engines fitted with a piston pump appeared in the Czech Lands, which were operated by a number of men pumping manually by means of a balance beam. These had a tank, to which water had to be brought in buckets and splashed on the fire by means of a firmly attached rotating metal branchpipe or by leather delivery hose. Horse-drawn manually-operated fire engines were produced up to the early 20th century and actively served for a further half-century in many smaller communities.
Twin-axle horse-drawn manually-operated fire engine with a filling tank and a twin-cylinder piston pump. Producer: unknown, dated 1795; this fire engine was later fitted with a new pump cast in 1820 by the firm of Carl Bellmann in Prague
This specialization has paid off handsomely, and speedway Jawas are the world’s best even today. A sport only for the brave is races on an ice speedway, where motorcycles without brakes but with dozens of sharp spikes on the wheels race round an ice rink. In this tough sport riders from the Soviet Union have dominated for years. In 1974, a Czech, Milan Spinka, beat them and became world champion on the machine on display.
Sometimes only a few were sold, in other cases several thousand. One of the machines which met with success here, and also for a while worldwide, was the Ner-A-Car scooter. The vehicle was easy to control and also designed for less experienced riders who did not want to get dirty on a journey. It was possible to ride on the scooter in normal clothing and even in a skirt.
In the past, cycle races following motorized pacers were a very popular sport..
The pace motorcycle rider, sitting in upright position, parted the air and so enabled the cyclist riding closely behind to reach speeds of up 100 km/h for a lengthy period. Pace motorcycles were individually built machines.
The one on display is a typical representative with a massive four-stroke engine, which does not even have a gearbox or suspension. It was donated by Augustin Vondrich from Prague.
