Saturday, October 14thThis weekend was our API-organized trip to Brno and Olomouc. Katelyn, Julianna, and I met Jana to take the train to Brno, which is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, capital of Moravia, and about 2 hours and 15 minutes from Prague. We checked into our hotel, walked around the vegetable market, and then headed to the medieval restaurant Jana had booked us for lunch where I had some crazy good garlic soup.
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Street view
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Flower stand at the market
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Medieval menu
 | Soup!
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After lunch, we had a guided tour of the town and it was very informative. I love guided tours because I feel like I get so much more out of visiting a place -- there are things I never would have known if I wandered around the town on my own (like the fact that Gregor Mendel did his pea plant experiments there(!!!); I think it has to be more than a coincidence that I just wrote about alleles in a previous post and now I'm breathing oxygen that might've been released by Gregor's pea plant's distant relatives).
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On our guided tour
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| Still on our guided tour |
A few interesting things about Brno are the town mascot (which you can learn about here), Gregor Mendel(!!!), and that it has an ossuary (which is the second-largest in Europe after the Paris catacombs). It also has its own astronomical clock that I wouldn't know was an astronomical clock if I hadn't been told.
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Town mascot
 | Still on our guided tour
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I like this picture so I put it in here :)
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Big horse
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After our above-ground tour, we had some time before our next activity so we stopped by what I think was a honey festival. There was a honey tasting, which I loved because I love things like that. My favorite was honey #24 because it was good and also my favorite number.
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| Honey tasting |
We then headed to the
Labyrinth under the Vegetable Market for an underground tour. The "labyrinth" is made up of cellars from the medieval and baroque eras that were connected with a series of tunnels after they were discovered. The tour was in Czech, but Jana translated. The cellars were used to store food, brew beer, and mature wine, as well as torture and imprisonment. I've often wondered how food was stored back in the olden times and I learned that ice was harvested during winter and kept in the underground cellars. It was so cold that the ice would stay frozen until the next winter.
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| This is how they chose to demonstrate how people would hold candles on a stick to have light in the cellars and it's crazy to me that someone chose to depict a human head like this; I'm not complaining, I love it -- it's just really scary and would fit in a little better over in the ossuary lol |
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Underground
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After the underground tour, we headed back to the hotel. I didn't feel like going back out, so I had the peanut butter and jelly I had packed for dinner and spent the night playing Candy Crush and watching the news. I've been jam packing almost every day and am trying to give myself time to recuperate, so it was nice that I felt satisfied enough with my time in Brno to let myself sit for a few hours.
Sunday, October 15thWe had free breakfast in the hotel (I love free breakfast) and then took the train to Olomouc, the sixth largest town in the Czech Republic and former capital of Moravia. Our guide met us at the station and we headed to Old Town to start the tour. It felt much smaller than Brno and was very quiet, which was a nice change of pace. Olomouc has the largest concentration of university students in the Czech Republic and I believe it could be compared to a college town like Athens, Ohio. Our guide said that many students are out of town on the weekend, which could have been why it seemed empty.
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On our tour
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Still on our tour
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Again, I love guided tours, but I don't have much to share; there were a lot of fountains and churches and Mozart named a song after it. It does have its own astronomical clock, which (I believe) is the only non-religious astronomical clock in the world. Instead of religious figures, it depicts communist ideals through working people which I enjoyed -- I love when people mix it up. After the tour, we headed to lunch where I got an entire tea pot to myself and a quesadilla.
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One of the fountains
 | Town center
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 | Town hall
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| Communist astronomical clock |
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| In front of the Olomouc Holy Trinity Column (there's one in almost every town I've been to so far) |
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At lunch
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| Tea in a pot |
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Quesadilla
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We had the afternoon free; I didn't have a plan so I wandered around and found myself in the Archdiocesan Museum. It felt like a maze and there were places where you had to go through doors and it really did not feel right. I felt like I was breaking and entering but there also wasn't any other way to go and nobody came to yell at me so I think I followed the rules to the best of my ability.
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A collection of monstrances (I just spent five minutes Googling for what they're called)
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After the museum, I headed back to the astronomical clock to meet the group. I walked by one of the prettiest university buildings I've ever seen and a statue of the green water demon I'd learned about on Friday.
(Note from the future: I am now seeing the green water demon everywhere and I think that might mean I should avoid water for the foreseeable future -- that's my plan to rent a pedal boat down the drain)
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Pretty university building
 | Water guy
 | This is the prettiest pigeon I've ever seen
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Julianna and I had a
high kick competition while waiting for the tram to the train station and then it was back to Prague!
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| This is a direct message to Julianna: I definitely won and that's payback for when you cheated at sudoku 😌 |
More pictures from Olomouc because I thought they were pretty
