Road trip

This past Sunday morning, Erin and I got up relatively early and took a road trip to Arad, Romania. Neither of us had ever been there, she was curious, and I decided that I should probably go to say "been there, done that", and so we hopped in my cool Honda Jazz and drove 2 hours to Arad. When we arrived, we found the McDonald's (wc stop) and then found the Best Western where we picked up a map of the city to scope out where to go and what to see.

Unfortunately, Arad is not like many European cities which typically have a very cool "walking street" in the heart of downtown...the "city center" in Arad is situated on either side of the main road in and out of town toward either Szeged or Budapest. But we made our way to the Maros River bank and walked along there for a spell, then made our way back toward the "center" of the city. We stumbled upon this small WWI memorial park...see picture above, where the pigeons would periodically do a "fly around", in unison, and as Erin commented, "They even look kind of pretty!"

Erin captured this picture of the statue, the Romanian flags and the pigeons and I think it is a really neat picture of what Paul talks about when he says, "Forgetting the past and pressing on toward what lies ahead." Yes, there is a statue dedicated to the past, but its cold, hardness depicts what can happen in our hearts if we try to hang on to the difficult memories of the past...we can become cold and hard and even unable to move. People may be able to look at us, but there is no life in the heart of an unforgiving person.

We found it interesting that the birds would take off and start flying away, but then would circle around and come back to where they started and settle down again. How often are we like those birds...we taste that freedom and we take off, testing our wings, but "peer pressure" or "fear of the unknown" or other things cause us to circle around and come back to the "familiar"? Funny that this tangible picture in this square shows these pigeons coming back to the foot of this statue...almost clinging to the past when the freedom promised in the skies above beckons with great promise for the future.