On Sunday night, I put a book into my Amazon.com shopping cart. I put a book in my cart that I’d seen at the International Spy Museum. When I looked at it, I had four items in my cart. I realized I’d never buy one of the books, so I deleted it.
These are normal occurences for me because I heart Amazon.com. I store everything in there that I want to remember to buy. I can save items for later, of which I had more than twenty, and Amazon.com will keep them until I buy or delete them.
After doing this, I thought nothing of it and browsed around the internet. I went back to order the book and found that my shopping cart looked like this:
Everything was gone. I logged out, cleared my cache, and logged in. This didn’t fix it. After some colorful verbal jousting with my monitor, I gave up on it for the night.
I e-mailed Amazon.com, explaining that everything was gone. They responded within hours, with a list of all items in my cart. My items still haven’t shown up for me to view, so I don’t know how I’ll resolve this. It’s very spooky.
Which made me think of my trip to Prague in May 1999. On that trip I visited Berlin, Krakow, and Prague. Prague was last on the trip, so I may have been nearing exhaustion by then. I do remember my journey onto the Charles Bridge (Karluv most). It was the last attraction I had to see in Prague before I returned to Berlin. I’d read that it’s impressive and overwhelming, which it is. I took a slow stroll across the bridge, viewing each of the 30 statues.
I remember being impressed with this statue at the time. I was ecstatic when the picture captured the feeling I had at the moment I saw it.
That statue is near the beginning of my journey on the bridge. I stopped every three or four statues to watch the street merchants, the tourists, and the river. I began to speed up a little as the sun set further. I wanted to see the remaining statues with sufficient sunlight, but darkness had set in by the end of the bridge.
I snapped pictures of the remaining statues in rapid succession of the statues that sparked my interest. This picture is a perfect example of the last pictures and the lighting.
I don’t remember snapping a second picture of this statue, but my developed film revealed that I had. I flipped past it quickly, assuming it was the double print. Once onto the next picture, a thought jumped into my head; something was different. I went back to the second picture of the statue and couldn’t believe what I saw. Look closely at both and compare.
I’ve looked at them numerous times, and it always makes my heart stop and my brain hurt. There is an explanation, but in nearly five years, I have yet to figure it out.