Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: christmas

Bata is one of the oldest shoe store chains in the Czech Republic, and I think this is their biggest and most important store, on Vaclavske Namesti in Prague (if I'm wrong on these points, someone please let me know). It's getting close to Christmas now, of course, so there are Christmas decorations all up and down Vaclavske Namesti.

One of the busiest Christmas setups is in Staromestske Namesti, the Old Town Square of Prague, where a stage has been set up (out of the picture to the right) for folk dancing and music.

Kotva is a large (supposedly Russian-owned) department store near Namesti Republiky in Prague, and they now have Christmas lights all over the whole store. This Christmas tree, off to one side, is in an odd spot, though.

This is the Mustek end of Vaclavske Namesti, decorated for Christmas of 2006, although Christmas is still more than a week away. The purple lights on the tree are an original touch, I think.

Being one of the first U.S. railroad stations built exclusively for electric trains (although not the first, as the second, and current, Grand Central Terminal, as well as C.U.T. both preceded it), 30th Street Station was nevertheless built to the grandiose standards of the steam era. This is the main concourse, still decorated for Christmas, on Boxing Day, 2000.

Before, I forget, I also saw this in Berlin. :-) Yeah, it's tasteless, but most Christmas decorations are, aren't they? No word on whether they wanted this to be St. Nicholas (Santa Claus), or Christmas Mann, their ripoff on the materialistic, secular American mutilation of St. Nicholas. :-)

This was one of my best shots of the trip, even if the greenish-yellow color temperature is a bit much. I like the sky, in particular, and I attribute the overall quality of this shot to the excellent (and expensive) Ektachrome E100GX film that I was shooting. It's not as nice as Kodachrome, but I still really, really like it. :-)

This is a shot that I meant to post with my other Brussels shots, but just never got around to. I hope you like it. :-)

This was the warning sign used during the Cold War to formally inform people crossing the border that they were entering the American sector. Although it's obviously obsolete now, it's been kept up as part of the overall preservation effort on Checkpoint Charlie.

This was taken from the western side of Checkpoint Charlie. When you face east, you see the poster of the East German soldier, and when you look west you see the poster of the American soldier, both posters being on the same post.

This was my first ever photo of Checkpoint Charlie, taken from the Eastern side in January of 2007, when the Christmas tree was still up. This was the same trip during which I shot the other Ektachromes of the Brandenberger Tor and other landmarks.