Riga Review

After taking a vacation in the Bavarian Alps and lake region of Austria, I'm sharing pictures with you this week. Hope you enjoy them! Mondsee  St. Wolfgang in Austria We saw several beautiful mountain lakes (called see in German) in Austria.  Obersee Hotel in St. Wolfgang Koenigsee   We loved all the Austrian buildings in the towns we visited. Everywhere we looked it was so picturesque.

A walk back in history today... During WWII, Czechoslovakia was under the control of the German army. Reinhard Heydrich, known as "the Butcher of Prague", was the commander of the Nazi army there. Many Czechs disappeared when Heydrich came to town because of his ruthlessness when dealing with the Czech people. He was also in charge of the "Final Solution" of the Jews in Europe. At the time, the Czech government-in-exile, with the cooperation of the British intelligence, planned an assassination of Heydrich to impress on the Allies and Stalin that the Czechs were in the fight to get rid of the Nazis. This plot was named Operation Anthropoid. In December, 1941, Jozef Gabcik (a Slovak) and Jan Kubis (a Czech), along with several other exiled Czech soldiers, were air-dropped into Czechoslovakia near Prague. They hid  among Czech patriotic families and anti-Nazi rebels for several months, planning the details of the assassination. Monument set up at attack s

For the last year, I've been sharing pictures of majestic ancient churches in the area of Prague. I recently decided that I've never spoken about the church that my husband has been serving during our year in the Czech Republic - St. Michael the Archangel Lutheran Church. Of all the one hundred spires of Prague, our church is the only one that is Lutheran in the entire city. St. Michael's was first built during the 1100s. Only two pillars  of the original structure are still in existence in the nave of our church. It has been owned by several different church bodies including the Catholic Church, the Benedictine monks, and  protestants. The German Lutherans purchased the church in the late 1700s. Today it is owned by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Czech Republic. Every Sunday three Lutheran congregations with three different pastors worship in this church. The Slovaks have their service at 9:30. The English service is at 11:00. And at 6:00, the Czechs hold their

We were in a city two hours east of Prague recently called Olomouc. While we were there, we visited St. Wenceslas Cathedral and Museum. I'd like to share the beauty of this church with you. St. Wenceslas was first built within the walled city of Olomouc during the 1100s. It was a smaller church at first that has been uncovered with archeological diggings recently. We were able to see some of the architectural ornamentation from back then. The museum displayed many of the altarware pieces used in the cathedral over the centuries including this gorgeous monstrance, called the "Monstrance of Gold Sun of Moravia", containing 18 emeralds and over 400 diamonds. Golden Sun of Moravia Also in the museum was a chalice made from an ostrich egg, seen on the left. That must be one-of-a-kind. Pulpit and main altar The cathedral itself was heavily ornamented in gold fixtures and stained glass windows. It's so amazing to admire churches like this tha

If you're going to be visiting Prague in the near future, I have a very unique hotel for you. Actually, it's two hotels joined by a cable car. The older one NH Prague City is located at the bottom of a hill and NH Collection Prague is on the top of the hill. Last August when we visited there, it was one hotel with the upper "floors" accessible through the cable car connecting the two buildings. As of May 1, it is now two "sister" hotels. I'm wondering if using the cable car to have access to rooms in the upper part got too confusing or complicated.  I have no idea how expensive these hotels would be, but I'm thinking that we'll never stay in them because they would cost way too much. They looked very fancy. We found out about this hotel with the cable car connection on a website called "Honest Prague". The host Janek told us about a free cable car to ride up the hill rather than paying for the cable car on Petrin Hill, so we we