Glass and Rocks

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Harrachov today - usual problems with parking - there was no parks! Nearest official parking was 3km from where we wanted to be, so we parked on a dirt patch just before the town. The glass works was in full swing making wine goblets today. They have a large furnace with several openings to get the glass, and 4 teams of workers. Each glass is hand made, but it is a production line. Two glass blowers make the bowl of the glass - blowing it into a wooden mould. This then gets passed to another worker, who fashions the stem, and then to another one who makes the base, then it is taken off on a cableway to a furnace so that it can cool down slowly. It’s hot work for the glass blowers, so thirst appeared to be largely quenched with beer. Most of them were smoking as they worked as well, so I am not sure how that works with lung capacity over time. Harrachov is also a ski area - looks like mainly for ski jumping. The jumps looked huge and very steep - even the ones that for beginners. There was a little snow around still on the hills, and it was cold. We turned south and headed to Cesky Raj. This is an area of limestone formations, with eroded towers of limestone sticking out of the surrounding forest. Alison and I wandered up to an old castle - again along a track that was really a road - through beech forest all with freshly opened leaves. The colours were fresh and lots of shades of green. We passed an area of forest that had been cut over - not much work for Ross in harvesting here - and looked at some of the logs. These were small - maybe 500mm in diameter. I tried counting rings and got to 90 by the time I got to the edge of the heartwood and they got too close together. I would guess that the log had 150 rings, so growth is slow.

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Photos

Harrachov - Glass making
Making wine goblets