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Playing roles
When I was a little girl, I assumed that people are either good or bad and play just one role in their lives. The role of their identity. When I was about 12 and my mother was complaining that teachers at school praised me whereas at home I was not that cooperative, I didn’t agree and couldn’t understand quite well what she was speaking about. It came much later that I realised that there was not just one role I played in my life and that there was nothing wrong about it. We take on many different roles, whether the traditional ones like the role of a mother, wife, boss,…
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PF 2013
The end of this year will arrive in two days and although I usually don’t make a lot of fuss about it, this turn makes me look back. It was an enormously difficult year for me to deal with and challenged me in many ways. There is a saying in Czech stating that things are never so good so that they couldn’t be better and never so bad so that they couldn’t be worse. So I tell myself that perhaps I should be grateful that things were not worse and hope that they will be better. I was watching “The Lord of the Rings” film series a few days ago…
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Trip to Prášilské jezero
During our summer stay in Šumava we visited “Prášilské jezero”. It is a glacial lake situated in the Šumava National Park at the altitude of 1080 metres above sea level. First we needed to climb a hill but as it was a beautiful sunny day accompanied by blue sky covered with occasional white puffy clouds, we really enjoyed the hike. At one place along the path up, people had built these small stone piles which looked very cute but I have no idea whether there was any meaning behind them. There were a few wind storms which severely damaged the woods in the area and the forest surrounding the lake…
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Light and shadows
Sometimes there are details which appear repeatedly in a short time span of my life bringing together new meaning to me. It’s like when you take a lemon, sugar and water and prepare lemon juice from them. By taste, you can still distinguish the ingredients but you cannot separate them anymore and even their taste is not entirely the same. It is how it started with light and shadows this time. I like Robert Ludlum and his spy stories and yesterday I finished reading the 3rd instalment of his Bourne series. I came across a sentence there: “Hugging the shadows of the successive storefronts, Jason crept slowly forward.” My breathing…
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Vydra river
It is said that those who didn’t see the beauty of the Vydra river, don’t know how beautiful Šumava really is. May I invite you to go for a walk with me and see how true these words are? The building you can see in the back of the first photo is “Antýgl”, which is a former homestead originated at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. There used to be glassworks for several hundred years. Nowadays there is a camp situated there, we were staying in it during our trip to the southern part of the Šumava National Park. About 200 metres from Antýgl a nature trail begins…
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Lost in translation
Some time ago I read a book in the Czech language and came to a statement saying literally that every cloud has a silver lining. It sounded strange to me as I’d never heard anyone to say such a phrase or saying in Czech. It didn’t fit in at all. As the book was a Czech translation of the English original, it occurred to me that the phrase might have been translated literally regardless of its possible figurative meaning so I went to look it up in a dictionary. It proved my suspicion true explaining that the saying means that every sad or difficult situation has a positive side. Properly…
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Two more peatland sceneries
Apart from the peatland Chalupská slať I wrote about some time ago, we visited two more peatland areas in that part of Šumava – Jezerní slať (Lake peatland) and Tříjezerní slať (Triple lake peatland). Both of them are also part of the first zone of nature protection of the Šumava National Park. Jezerní slať (Lake peatland) was designated a nature reserve in 1933. Its name comes from a lake which has been overgrown with peat moss. When you arrive there and follow a nature trail, soon you come to an observation tower which enables you to see far behind tops of surrounding trees. The area of the peatland spreads over…
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Trip from Modrava
I’d like to get back to those few days we spent in Šumava this summer. We were staying in a camp, going on trips and for one day we planned a trip from Modrava to our camp. We had to go by bus just a few kilometres and then follow a marked track. When we were getting off the bus, it was already drizzling and we needed to take on our raincoats. Well, I don’t mind walking in rain, but our cameras had to stay in our bags and I regretted that so much. On the one hand I felt really annoyed and on the other I tried to persuade…
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Bee in my bonnet
There are doors which open in our lives and invite us to explore other rooms. We may discover their beauties, commonness or unpleasantness but they all leave some experience we should learn of. But of course, we all hope for the beauties… A few weeks ago I was invited to write a guest post for a “Vision and Verb” blog. I didn’t know the blog so I was browsing it for a while, reading some of its posts and looking for connections. I found motivation, inspiration, imagination and a wonderful group of cooperators and their guests. I agreed and wrote my guest post and started to participate in commenting. It’s…
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First snow
It was snowing all day and night yesterday and as the temperature was stuck under the zero, we woke up into beautiful whiteness this morning. Just on Friday I finished covering some of the plants in our garden with branches to protect them against harsh winter and I’m so glad I managed to do it in time. We have a saying stating that “Martin comes riding a white horse”, which relates to 11th November being the Martin’s name day. It is quite usual that in the middle of November we experience the first snow, hence the white horse. This year the snow has come a bit sooner and I find…
