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| Park near the AquaForum with the ice starting to melt |
Another gorgeous day here in Františkovy Lázně.
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| Sculpture near the AquaForum |
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| Colonnade of the Salt and Meadow Springs |
At breakfast we had a new couple from the south of German near the French boarder. So sweet and friendly and although they don't speak a lot of English they really tried, along with the family from Berlin to communicate with me.
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| Detail on small building near the Colonnade of the Salt and Meadow Springs. The coat-of-arms for the town is in the center and symbolized by an oblique wavy blue stripe, represening the Ohre River, dividing the shield in two parts. The six narrow oblique blue stripes in the left upper green part stand for mineral springs which were known at that time - the Frantisek, Studeny, Lucni, Louise and Novy springs. The right lower part of the shield consists of two parts as well. There is a black one-headed eagle (a female eagle) with spread wings in it's upper golden part. The eagle holds Aesculapius' stick - in natural colors - in it's talons. The stick is entwined by a green serpent. The eagle refers to the founder of the spa, doctor Adler (Adler means an eagle in German.) The lower part with the red cock walkign to the right is silver. It refers to another man who played an important part in the history of the spa, Jindrich Rottenhann (Rotte Hahn, i.e, the red cock.) The Latin inscription Concordia parvae res crescunt means: "Small things grow through concord." |
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| Coat of Arms |
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| Fountain in front of Emperor's Spa (Spa II) public spa |
I had two schedule treatments today the first being a moor pack where they take heated moor mud or peat and warm it then put it all over your back and then you sit for 20 minutes. This was the first time I've ever had this done and if it wasn't for the technician who just kept giving me orders in German and basically not listening to me when I asked questions it would have been very pleasant She was just militant and had her job to do and nothing was going to deter her from her list of to dos. And from all the pictures I'd seen of the treatment the people are always lying on their stomach and the mud is piled onto their back but she took the mud and smashes it against a tarp on the massage bed and then she had me lay down with my back against the mud and then she wrapped me up in blankets and plastic and I relaxed in the warmth. I do think her way makes more sense because you're using gravity to press against the mud so it should absorb more fully or draw out the toxins more fully, I'm really not sure what it's suppose to do.
I did some computer work then went down for my next treatment but the massage machine they needed was broken so they've rescheduled it for Saturday at 7:50am which is good.
So I had the whole afternoon to just enjoy the spring-like weather and sunshine while walking around the surrounding parks and then off to the Harvey hotel to enjoy some sauna/steam room time which was nice although the sauna was completely occupied by 3 large, naked German men for well over an hour and they laughed and gabbed loudly the whole time. They kept coming in and out of the sauna going into the freezing cold plunge pool (making lots of excited and exasperated noises as they splashed around in the frigid water) then the traipsed back to the hot sauna. I know it's the healthy way to use the sauna and I've done the hot/cold routine many times before but that cold plunge is really frightening and shocking to your system the first few times but by the 4th or 5th you kind of look forward to getting cool. I had to leave before the men were finished with their sauna gab session and I just didn't feel like squeezing in there with them so I did mostly the steam room and the regular pool which was fine.
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| Zeleznaty (The Ferrous Spring) |
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| Stepanka (The Stephana Spring) |
After a short walk I was at the Frantisek spring pavilion where I got my evening water cure. I had also stopped off at the Glauber IV earlier, before my long walk, to see if it would have the same purgative effects as it did yesterday. Happy to say it was a less forceful effect but still a cleansing one. I know, none of you really want to know all these details but when I look back at my blog these little notes will help remind me of the day's events because I know I'll forget as soon as I'm back to the NYC rat race.
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| Women pulling tap for my Glauber IV water |
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| View of New Colonnade |
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| I liked the tree and if you looked really closely past the trunk you'd see the Little Frankie Statue |
I was taking a picture of a beautiful leafless tree when I young lady came up to me asking in Czech where the Little Frankie statue was so I walked her over and took a picture of her with him and then she kindly got one of me rubbing his well worn foot.
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| St. Jan Nepomuk statue near the river |
It was only a 5 minute walk back to the hotel and when I'd climbed up the 4 flights to my room the lovely couple from this morning at breakfast were waiting for the elevator and the wife asked me to wait just one moment and sent her husband to their room and he came back with a box of the chocolate spa wafers for me. How incredibly kind they are and thoughtful. I had just met them this morning and they were so sweet and brought me back a treat from their excursion today to the Abby in Tepla not far from the town. I've truly met the most lovely people. They leave tomorrow morning to drive back to southern Germany about four hours away.
The nice German family from my table were in the lounge to play cards and I was able to connect to Google Translate and communicate a little more with them and it turns out the daughter is 51 years old and nurse in a nursing home and her sister is also a nurse. She has a 30 year old son who is a professional chief in Berlin and her husband of 26 years is in Thailand on vacation by himself for two weeks because she refused to get on a plane for 10 hours and chose instead to come here with her parents who drove. They are such a sweet, sweet family and the picture below is of my table. The older couple at the front of the table are the ones who gave me the spa wafers and the husband and wife are behind them and the daughter is at the head of the table in the back.
They were also telling me when I had shown them my pictures of their beautiful city, Berlin, and saw the photo's I'd take of the "East Side Gallery" that part of it came down last week. I was shocked to hear it and thought that it had fallen down and asked if people had been hurt or killed and they laughed and said no. I didn't understand exactly what they meant so I looked it up and it turns out it is being taken down and moved to a nearby park because of a construction project but there is lots of protesting going on and I can understand both sides, the people of Berlin want the wall to stay up where it originally was as there is so little of the wall left to memorialize the past and as a good lesson for peace in the future and then on the other side the city needs jobs and construction brings jobs and money. It will be interesting to see if they can come up with a compromise that makes both sides happy. Here is an excerpt from the NY Times about the incident last week and also a few pictures that I took when I was there in January. I'm so glad I saw it when I did.
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| East Side Gallery - Berlin, Germany January 2013 |
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| East Side Gallery - Berlin, Germany January 2013 |
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| East Side Gallery - Berlin, Germany January 2013 |
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| East Side Gallery - Berlin, Germany January 2013 |
"BERLIN — In November 1989, the Berlin Wall
opened, and soon after was being torn to pieces by jubilant crowds from both
sides. Almost a quarter of a century later, Berliners again took to the streets
over the wall — only this time to protect what is left of it. Police officers
stood guard Sunday at the East Side Gallery, part of which was being removed to
make way for new apartments. Late last week, when construction workers began
dismantling a roughly 70-foot section of the wall’s longest remaining expanse —
a nearly mile-long monument to peace that is covered in paintings and is known
as the East Side Gallery — protesters turned up in droves. The first hastily
organized demonstration on Friday drew several hundred, but over the weekend
thousands of people massed to protect the huge concrete slabs from being
relocated to an adjacent park. They were particularly incensed that the project
was to make way for an access road for new luxury apartments — helpful for a
city whose budget could use bolstering from development, not so helpful for
ordinary Germans. “History should never be a luxury,” read one placard,
capturing the protesters’ dismay over gentrification. City officials and the
developer, Maik Uwe Hinkel of Living Bauhaus, responded by noting that the
space would also serve the construction of a nearby pedestrian bridge over the
river, to replace one destroyed in World War II, according to the daily
newspaper Berliner Zeitung."
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| Side view of the New Colonnade. I love the contrast between the sharp angles and circles and the curved columns |
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| Me and little Frankie |
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| One of the few empty buildings I've seen. I'm sure it will be a renovated hotel soon |
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| Row of buildings behind my hotel |
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| Pretty building behind my hotel |
Again a more relaxing day than anything but time is flying by here so I'm glad I've been able to enjoy walking in the sunshine. And right now there are two men totally absorbed in a soccer game here in the lounge it's as if they've been mesmerized, their stares are so intense. It turned out, from what the man in the picture below told us, that its a match between Scotland and Italy and he's rooting for Italy.
And the lovely Czech lady from yesterday is using her laptop next to me. She told me they just elected their newest president and he is getting inaugurated on Friday so I'm sure there will be a great celebration here I'll let you all know how they do things here.
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| Marie working on her computer |
