Travel Tips - Air Travel

Long draw air travel, especially in economy/tourist/pack-em-in social class can acquire very uncomfortable and boring. In an effort to ease some of these negatives we trust some of the followers might help:

• wear the most comfy clothing you have. Forget about 'dressing up' for traveling - those years disappeared decennaries ago. Comfort is the key.
• Once on board take your shooes and set on an other brace of sock. Put your place back on a few proceedings before you're due to land.
• Get quit of or loosen belts to halt restricting blood flow.
• Download and black and white out maps of all the airdromes you will be using. Some airdromes are a incubus to happen you manner around. These tin also get rid of a spot of the ennui of a trip. Survey the map of the airdrome you're due to set down at next.
• To avoid waiting at the airdrome if a flight is delayed phone call the air hose to corroborate take-off times.
• Check in at least 2 hours early. There is always a opportunity that you will acquire 'bumped' if you're late in line.
• Check your baggage allowance (carry-on and storage) and do certain you're not over as this tin cause holds or you may even have got to go forth some of your material behind. This is a existent issue you should not disregard. A few old age ago I was on a flight from Capital Of Singapore to Capital Of The Russian Federation with a 30 kilograms allowance but on the flight from Capital Of The Russian Federation to Greater London the allowance was only 20 kilograms on the same airline. It was either wage US$50 per kilogram over the allowance or go forth material behind. Iodine was traveling very light and had only about 7 kilograms on me. I helped other riders as best I could by carrying some other material but some had to go forth points behind. Women were crying (one had to go forth a beautiful baby buggy and others personal effects). Be careful!
• If your flight is cancelled don't hotfoot for the ticket counter, as everyone else will and it might take quite a piece before you can acquire the discourse options with a staff member, ring your traveling agent or the air hose instead. So do certain you have got got contact inside information for all the air hoses you'll be flying with (you should be able to happen these on your e-tickets which you have available - right?).
• Be aware that there is a good opportunity you might acquire 'bumped' - not be allowed, for whatever ground the air hose chooses, to catch the flight. If this happens, usually because the air hose have overbooked the flight to do certain it acquire filled up, the air hose will normally offering to free adjustment until you can catch the adjacent available flight and/or offer you a fillip of some type such as as an upgrade. If they don't offer anything Ask!
• If a flight is delayed by an 'Act of God' - ie bad weather, terrorist attack, safety problem, etc. then the air hose sees that to be 'your problem' and not theirs. So no free adjustment or particular offers. It is at modern times like this you necessitate to maintain your cool, do certain you have got got somewhere you can sit down comfortably and maybe even kip and do certain you have some bites and H2O on you.
• If you desire the best place available inquire for a bulkhead or exit-row seat. These have got more than leg room and are usually the last to be assigned. So when you check up on in inquire for one of these. Another ground to get early! Note: You may have got to look tantrum and healthy as in an exigency you may be expected to open up an exigency exit.
• Stuck at the airdrome waiting for the adjacent flight. Check out if you can acquire into the air hoses 'executive lounge.' Many air hoses will let you in if you pay a little fee and expression neat and tidy.
• Drink tons of H2O on the flight. The air conditioning sucks wet out of the air and you can dehydrate quite rapidly.
• If you desire to continue that great suntan do certain you cover yourself with moisturizer as the dry air can do all your difficult work to simply flake off and go forth you as pale as you were when you started your holidays.
• Don't purchase bottled H2O at airdromes as you will pay dearly for it. Get yourself a mugful with a sipping lid. The airdrome eating houses will normally fill up it with chilled H2O for free and the flight attenders will happily refill it on the flight.
• Lubricate contacts regularly on a flight as the dry air can do you problems. Or acquire quit of the contacts and set on your spectacles for the continuance of the flight.
• Ear hurting during landing (most common) or take-off can be a existent job for some people. To acquire alleviation either masticate something or block your olfactory organ with your fingers and blow into your oral cavity (as if you're trying to blow a trumpet) as difficult as you can - if you can experience air rushing into your ears then it's working. Keep blowing until the pressure level equalizes.
• Walk as much as you can on the flight. This aid keep blood circulation, halts edemia (collection of H2O at the feet which can do swelling) and it also cut downs significantly the potentially deathly jobs of Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT).
• Do not jest about guns or bombs. This is illegal and may see you in jailhouse for a long stay.
• Earplugs can be utile to cut out the noise from that child screaming in the adjacent row or to just assist you acquire to sleep.
• A little inflatable cervix support can assist you kip if you normally have got problems.
• Go to the bathroom just before you land. Brush your teeth, wash your human face and see if you can empty your bladder. If you utilize make-up use a little. This volition aid you experience a batch better and more than relaxed when you make land.

Plague -Plague Columns - Marian Columns - Mary the Protector

In Eastern and Central Europe, supplications against recurrence of Plague, and gratitude for deliverance, take the form of Marian Columns in many towns, or Plague Columns. In the Czech Republic, there was a particularly virulent epidemic in about 1680, that led to many towns constructing in about 1715 these Plague or Marian, Columns. Here, at Kutna Hora, in the Czech Republic, see Mary at the top with her crown of stars, and the piles of shapes beneath, leading up like so many agonizing buboes, to where she finally rests. See Czech Republic Road Ways. Read about this town in the Czech Republic that lists its Marian Column. //www.zamekvranov.cz/screen.php?str=pamatky_obce_vranov&jazyk=en. Or, see its extreme form - almost ugly in its representation of lump-like pustules, at Olomuc, CZ. Do your own Images search for Olomouc Marian Column.

How did Mary arise to this position, as somehow a safety source from death? No direct answer, but some religious groups give roundabout ones: www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Annodomini/THEME_11/EN/theme11-7. It looks like when it comes down to absolute devastation, a goddess figure works better. Theologians among us?


How humans react to unfathomable disaster. There are many fountains and other kinds of memorials to the era of the Black Death, and how people tried to expiate whatever forces were bringing it on again and again. There were at least three forms of it.

This fountain showing death, disease and suffering from the Plague I believe was in Oberammergau, Germany, or perhaps Garmisch.

A familiar memorial and way to keep the Plague from coming again is the pledge to act a play out in Oberammergau, Germany, every ten years. The next will be in 2010. See www.neuschwanstein-country.net/hotels/Oberammergau/en-oberam. Other sources:
www3.iath.virginia.edu/osheim/intro.

The Plague affected politics, culture, religion, society. See also "The Black Death, Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe" by Robert S. Gottfried, The Free Press, 1983.

One site focuses on the specific outbreak 1347-1350, and focuses on the rat infestation and rats as carriers of the fleas that passed on the Plague, see www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/.

Climate change - attention, out there - can also be dispositive in how a disease spreads. Other sources say it was not just the rodent infection. That combined with climate change 1050-1347, to extreme cold and wet; then add the movements west of the Huns and others from the East, carrying Plague from where Plague seems to have originated in conditions there, and the carrying of it from port to port. Then, a period of respite, perhaps 8-10 years, maybe more, and it came again. The sick rats died, the survivors began to reproduce again, the infection was still being fostered by the climate and other conditions, and it began again. And again.

Over a hundred years. 1350-1500. Enormous and repetitive depopulation. Overall perhaps a third of the European population died. In each bout, maybe 10% here, 30% there, 50% somewhere else, and then it all began again in differing proportions. And smallpox, measles.

But many modern medicine and religious and literature ideas began with coping with Plague, as did great social and economic change. Bubonic Plague. The Plague. The Black Death.

For more general info, see www.themiddleages.net/plague.

Black Madonnas: Medieval (and earlier); early pagan roots?

Finding Black Madonnas

As we find more, we add:

New: See our consideration about a Black Madonna at Maria Plain, Salzburg, Austria, at Austria Road Ways, Maria Plain, Black Madonna?.

Our photo failed, so we rely on a fair use thumbnail: from http://www.mariaplain.at/

Maria Plain, Black Madonna? Salzburg, Austria

As we recall, there was also a copy at Maria Plain of the Jasna Gora Black Madonna.  Someone go back.

Mariazell, Austria:  we missed seeing this one, so here is a thumbnail

Note that this site does not even mention she is black, at ://www.sacred-destinations.com/austria/mariazell-shrine-of-our-lady.htm/. This site says she was once painted black, see http://books.google.com/books?id=2L4q8sM4JysC&pg=PA401&lpg=PA401&dq=mariazell+austria+black+madonna&source=bl&ots=RmTF6K1Ljk&sig=dI-wXXSFfE0VzrPKUkAgVd0PdPE&hl=en&ei=vmy-StbxB8XQ8Qba1dWhAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=mariazell%20austria%20black%20madonna&f=false/. 

For our older list:


1.  Gdansk, Poland

Black Madonna, Church of St. Mary, Gdansk, Poland

Black Madonna at the Church of Saint Mary, Gdansk, Poland. There as another Black Madonna at that Church, that looks like a copy of the Black Madonna at Jasna Gora Monastery, also in Poland.

No further information yet.

Note that this may not be a Black
Madonna" because there is no child. The inscription looks like a Russian reference, by the script - but we are not expert on that.  See Poland Road Ways.

2. Mont St. Michel, France
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Black Madonna, Mont St. Michel, France

Black Madonnas are found throughout Europe, and seem to date from the early middle ages, mostly. Some may be earlier, and the legends and stories explaining them are varied.

For a background for these, and where they are, black virgin statues at www.ancientquest.com/embark/blackvirgin; and Eann Begg's at www.udayton.edu/mary/resources/blackm/blackm.
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There is a theory to fit each person's predisposition as to why. No one explanation fits them all. See saxakali.com/suzar/madonna, for a history of black madonnas.

Here is the Black Madonna at Mont St. Michel, France. See if you agree that our western religious orientation is to downplay the role of the black, and lands connected to our Bible that were in Africa, see Martin Luther's Stove, Translation Serving a Cultural Agenda.

See also ://www.udayton.edu/mary/resources/blackm/blackm.

3.  Altotting, Germany

Black Madonna, Altotting, Germany
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This is the Black Madonna at Altotting, Germany.
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We also saw another Black Madonna at Guadalupe, Spain. This was a tiny triangular shaped Madonna with a tinier head, very high up, and with a multitude of costumes on display that change with the seasons and feast days.

These places are usually also pilgrimage destinations.  Another site names another black madonna at Altotting, see the small A-shape, doll-like form that appears in many places, at ://romanmiscellany.blogspot.com/2006/09/alttting.html/  The explanation there is that her face is darkened by the centuries - but somehow the face of the child remains light. 







4.  Jasna Gora, Czechestochowa, Poland; and Wroclaw Poland

Black Madonna, Wroclaw, Poland (copy of Jasna Gora?)
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This is the Black Madonna at Wroclaw, Poland, apparently a copy of the original at Czestochowa, Jasna Gora Monastery, Poland. Do an "images" search for Black Madonna, Jasna Gora, and see the similarities - no photos were permitted of it.

See discussion re the broadly different representation of the Black Madonna in the Jasna Gora gift shop (different dress, and elaborate crowns, and varying skin tones available for purchase, including pale Caucasian white), at Poland Road Ways.

No one explanation fits all the Madonnas. Some charred, others originally black, others buried. This source presents the thesis that white madonnas were later in time than the black madonnas. Some find African origins. See www.africanbynature.com/links/madonnalinks.
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Here is a picture of the small and high on the wall Black Madonna at Guadalupe, Spain. Too high for a good picture using my camera: See www.solt3.org/guadalupespain/.

5. Copy of Jasna Gora at Gdansk, Poland

Black Madonna, St. Mary's Church, Gdansk, Poland (copy of Jasna Gora)

Here is a copy of the Jasna Gora Black Madonna at Gdansk, Poland, also showing the same kind of clothing as at Wroclaw.

Even the "images" search shows some versions with the crowns and different dress, and I can't remember the original any more. I thought I was buying a picture of it, but apparently not. Someone go check it out?

This is a different concept from the "inculturated" black madonnas that reflect a cultural depiction, so that there would also be madonnas with the facial features and skin tones of the people whose conversion is sought; or ones with features like those of the faithful in the area. See www.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/blackmdn. What color was Mary? Or Jesus? What does it say about us, that we have to ask?

See this site for connections to pagan black goddesses, see crystalinks.com/blackisis.

I looked up official images of Mary at this site, catholic-forum.com/saints/saintbvm, but found none of the Black Madonnas.