Harvey Travel Arts

This, my friends, is the "John Lennon Peace Wall" in Prague. I hesitated to post a photo of the wall, for fear that it would indicate my endorsement of the messages scribbled in colorful madness. Finally, I found a photo of the wall that blurs most of the messages. Just know that I'm posting this for a different reason. This otherwise normal wall became an outlet in the early 1980s not long after John Lennon's death. The messages have transformed over the years, but the general secular ideas of "peace" remain. However, there isn't much peace, in my opinion, in a wall filled with disarray. The peace that is so often referred to is not a perfect peace. The peace desired by society is unattainable; someone is always challenging another person's rights and beliefs. Perfect peace, peace in our spirit, no matter what is going on in the world, comes from Christ. Galatians 5:22 & 23 " But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsu...

We've completely upgraded our computer system. Earlier this summer, you may remember my posts about the computer virus on the PC laptop. We purchased a MacBook with the idea that we'd eventually get a Mac desktop computer (whatever the name of it is). We saved up the money and I'm now typing this from the new desktop. All of the thousands of pictures are on here, but I haven't yet figured out how to efficiently search photos. I prefer to do so by folder and view them, but I just haven't learned the Mac way of doing this. So, I picked a random "blind" photo from the "miscellaneous Germany" files and posted. I think this is near Garmisch, perhaps the tip top or edge of Hohenschwangau. If so, this would have been taken many years before. Perhaps it was my mom's first visit: she was amazed at the snow that came down as we traveled to the mountains in June.

I'm not sure where in the city this photo was taken, but it gives a beautiful glimpse into the world of Prague. My "history" with the Czech Republic is an interesting one. My fifth grade teacher had each of us study a different European country, write a report and display a booth at a "fair" in our classroom. I don't remember how exactly we got to choose our countries, but I do remember all the "cool" countries were taken when it was my turn to make the choice: Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Ireland. Our sheltered fifth grade class knew about Italy. After all, who hadn't had lasagne and pizza, right? And who didn't know about French accents? But Czechoslovakia (as it was still called then) was nowhere on our radar. That's the country I picked. I learned about the country, did the report, but was disappointed that I didn't get something I was more familiar with. Little did I know that I would someday live in Germany and h...

Some of you may have read my entry about the Jewish "ghetto" (that's the actual word, it originated there, I'm not being crude) in Venice. There were Jewish quarters like this all over Europe. The Jews were segregated, lived by curfews and many other laws. One of the Jewish quarters was in Prague, where I recently visited with Brian and my mom. We saw some of the synagogues, the Jewish museum, and learned a lot about their history. The old Jewish cemetery was something that I was not quite expecting. Most modern cemeteries bury the dead in neat rows, sometimes stacked a few deep, but this was unlike anything I had seen before. The Jews were only allowed so much land in their quarter for the Jewish Burial Society to, well, bury the deceased. This meant that people were stacked, tombstomes were crowded and it's more like a hill. I know that the people who died and were buried are no longer in this place, but for some reason the cemetery saddened me. Perhaps it was b...