Back from Vacation

I'm finally back to my home computer and my regular ole American keyboard.  I am going to miss those umlaut keys, though.

I won't torment OHW readers with much vacation news.  My basic idea of vacation is to sleep late, get up and eat breakfast, go to a cafe and drink coffee and read the newspaper, have an Eiskaffee (in Europe that means coffee with ice cream, not coffee with pieces of ice in it), take a siesta, go to a cafe and read another newspaper and maybe a book or magazine, have dinner, go to bed.  Then repeat for a couple of weeks.

Among several other things that make Berlin my favorite tourist city, they consistently have great coffee.

I did have a couple of more interesting encounters with churches while I was away.  I attended a performance of Anton Bruckner's 8th Symphony, performed by the Brucker Orchestra of Linz, Austria, in the Studienkirche of Passau, Germany.

And I also had a visit to the Wieskirche in the countryside of Bavaria, Germany.  Also known as the Wallfahrtskirche zum Gegeisselten Heiland auf der Wies, which their Web site translates as the Pilgrimage Church of the Scourged Savior.  It's an officially designated UNESCO cultural site.

Bavaria and the nearby regions of Austria have a number of pilgramage churches, where people go to pray for miracles.  There's also a scattering of sacred springs of various sorts.  I had holy water from two different sites while I was there.  Ever since then, I've been having dreams of John Ashcroft burning heretics on giant pyres.  I'm not quite sure what that means.

Ashcroft wouldn't approve of the Wieskirche, though.  Not only has it been named a cultural site by that Satanic UN agency.  Besides that, one of the prominent statues at the front of the church borrows directly from that heathen Greek mythology.  It shows one of those little chubby cherubs - they're called Puttos in German, which somehow seems to be the perfect name for them - riding a dolphin.  And that whole scene is held up a by a beautiful Mother Earth, aka ?? (Gaia), who has, well, nekkid breats.  Ashcroft would want to slap a burka on her right away!

So I'm doing to be getting caught up on the news and posting about it here.  I'm also trying to update the Old Hickory page a bit, with additional links and some indexes to use for links in the All About Me feature.  It's going to take me a while to get those all set up.