Absence makes the heart grow fonder...

...or so the old saying goes.
I have no idea if this is true, but, in any event, I shall be absent until the third day of April, 2014.

I shall be in Braunau, Innsbruck, Zurich and Geneva and back.  Driving a total of over 2000 km during a total of 9 days...  A Mini Vacation ... and I am looking forward to it. Let's hope that the weatherman does play along with some clear skies and sunshine.
In Geneva I will visit my grand daughter who is there on a student exchange
So... be patient... I'll be talking to you again soon..

so promises (or threatens)
Bertstravels.

What am I ???

I think I must straighten out some misunderstandings : There are some of my faithful viewers who think that, just because I write about Religion, sometimes, or show religious images, such as the recent Fasting Cloths, I must be a religious man. Maybe even a Catholic ! Or, at the very least, that I must be "searching"....

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let me state it right off the bat:

I am an Agnostic. 

I have probably always been an Agnostic, but did not know it, could not put a name to it.
I am not a Theist, nor a Deist, nor an Atheist. I am an Agnostic.

Does anybody care ? Probably not !
As a Theist I would believe in a "caring God"
As a Deist I would believe in a Creator, who does not care.
As an Atheist I would believe that there is No God.

But believing that there is a God, or believing that there is no God requires the same amount of Faith.
And Faith means to accept someone's statement in the complete absence of any credible evidence.
I have no Evidence that there is a God. I also have no Evidence that there is No God.
Therefore I can be neither, a Theist or an Atheist.

Therefore, the only handle that fits me is that of the Agnostic.

Please do not confuse being a Theist with being a Christian or  even a Catholic. One just has to study Christianity and its subsidiary, Catholicism, to recognize the untold number of contradictions, in both the Old and the New Testament. These books, along with the Koran and all the other religious works, were written by men, and therefore open to unbelievable bias and stunning contradictions.

So, when you see certain religious edifices or read some religious sounding remarks in this Blog, please  do not come to hasty and erroneous conclusions.

Bertstravels.

VIEW THEM IN THE LARGE FORMAT

If you are at all interested in the artwork of the "Fastentücher" shown below, may I recommend that you view them in the largest format possible. Simply place the curser onto the picture and click...
you will then see the image almost frame filling and in far greater detail.

Some more "Fastentücher"

Having shown you two of the larger "Fasting" or " Hunger cloths", I would like to show you some smaller installations in some smaller churches. 
There is, besides the explanation of the "punishments" of the sinners, another explanation for the picture-decorated "Fasting Cloths".. That of education: It is said that since most of the congregation attending these churches, large or small, were illiterate, could therefore not read the Bible, for them it was these pictures which would tell the stories of the Old and New Testament.
I find this explanation somewhat far fetched and unlikely to correspond with the truth. Since, even in the time of my youth, (which was not all that long ago) Christian Lay Persons were, if not outright forbidden, certainly discouraged from reading the Bible. Only priests would understand and could interpret the meaning of "The Good Book".
In fact, the Clergy was afraid that halfway intelligent people would wonder about the blatant contradictions and outright nonsense contained in this work.
But enough of that. Let me show you some "Fastentücher" in the small church of Theissenegg in Carinthia:

above:

Taken from the organ loft,

this image shows all three cloths used to hide the Altar (centre)

and the pictures on both sides.

The Centre Cloth depicts the famous "Sermon of the Mount of Olives"

With the desciples half asleep

and Jesus preaching, with an Engel in the right upper corner.

  

As is usual in the Catholic Church,

Brutality is in the forefront of their stories and pictures.

The Cross surely was one of the most hideous

instruments of torture and executions.

Whether you are an ardent Catholic, or not, the visit to the churches displaying the "Fastentücher" (Cloths of Fasting) is of considerable interest on many levels. 

Some "Fasting", or "Hunger Cloths" of Carinthia

The "Fasting Cloth", also called the "Hunger Cloth" is used mostly in Catholic Churches in the Austrian Provinces of Carinthia (Kärnten) and Tirol, as well as in some parts of Germany.
It is a sometimes very large piece of textile material used between Ash-Wednesday and the Saturday before Easter (46 days). 
Originally monochrome, but later richly decorated, it is fastened in such a way as to hide the view of the Altar and Crucifixes. 
It was, and is meant to be a penalty imposed upon the "sinning congregation" by depriving them of the visual pleasure of the Altar and the Crucifix.
And everybody, so the irrational teaching of the church goes, is a "Sinner".

The "Hunger Cloth" in the Cathedral (Dom) of  Gurk,

for instance, measures about 9 x 8.8 meters

and dates back to 1458

The Fasting Cloth, created by Master Konrad von Friesach

with details of some squares below.

A similar installation In Millstatt am Millstättersee

deprives the faithful 

of the view of the Altar, but also gives them 

many interesting and colourful pictures

to view.

The Petzen

I've talked about "The Mountain" ! 

Our House Mountain!

The Petzen !

So here are a couple of pictures, taken from one of the rolling hills behind our town.

SPRING HAS SPRUNG

When in the early morning the sun hides behind the mountain, 
the air is fresh and feels new.
That's the time to get in the car and drive up the hills which face the mountain, there to park the car, shoulder all your camera gear and start walking. 
After a while you first feel and then you catch the first glimpse of the sun, peeking from behind the Mountain.
The snow fields of the "Petzen" (the bear) start to glisten like jewels. They are too brilliant to keep your eyes open without squinting.
Up there it is still cold and wintry. Beautiful, they say, 
for Spring Skiing.
But down here, atop the rolling hills, spring has arrived and there is no denying it.
It is so warm that you take off your coat and walk on in shirt sleeves, which you soon roll up to above your elbows.
And then you come to this bush:
Choking with blossoms
and the butterflies
have discovered it
before you.

M U S I N G S

It truly seems that winter has blown the last whistle. Even when I take our dog out for a last run at about midnight, the air is mild and no longer biting. 
At 7 O'clock in the morning, when I get up, the day is full of light and the sky is blue and I can feel the sun, just behind the mountain.

Snowbells abound in our garden. Sure they have been planted some years ago. They do not grow wild as they did in the woods along the river close to the town where I grew up, but, being perennials, they come up every year as soon as bad-man winter has flown the coop.

This reminds me of the time when I was a boy. I lived in a small Austrian town on the border to Germany. The river called Inn was and still is the border between the two countries. Along the river Inn, and up river runs a dense stand of trees. 
Up and up along the river the "Au" stretches for many kilometers and in Spring, in certain places, there were areas between the birch trees and the elms and the willows almost as far as the eye could reach, white on white with Snowbells, interspersed with little blue flowers, called Sky stars, and where the ground was very moist, yellow  "Key Flowers" also grew in profusion. 
I've not been there in a long long while and I wonder if these flowers still grow there in such masses.
We used to pick a bunch of Snowbells, surround them with the blue Skystars and surround those with the yellow  Keyflowers. Then we would wrap some moss, which we peeled from the north side of certain trees, around this bouquet of spring flowers, tie the whole thing three or four times with thin twigs from a willow bush, and another slightly sturdier twig was bent like a U and, upside down, would be fastened to this arrangement. 
We'd dip the moss into water and carry the whole thing home.
There was only a very short time in Spring that you could do that, because the yellow Keyflowers came out at just about the time when the Snowbells and the Sky Stars were on their last legs. To find all three flowers in fresh bloom was tricky. You just had to know where to look. Of course, we knew every square meter of the  "Au". 
When Summer came, and the Inn was no longer freezing cold, we'd leave our shirts and pants hidden near the sand bank and in our underwear we'd run three or four kilometers up river and let the current take us back to where we had started.
It was a great place: The "Au" and the "Inn"

so, fondly remembers
Bertstravels.

The Last of its Kind

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

I promise: This is the last pun for a while.

and you can rely on

Bertstravels

This is ridiculous !!!!!

A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

and while we are in France:

"If you jumped off a bridge in Paris, you'd be in Seine."

That's enough of that nonsense.
Bertstravels.

Not a Pun, but very true..................

... there are two theories about arguing with women:
Neither one works....

PUNS are Beautiful

Two Silk Worms had a race.
They ended up in a tie !