Czech Republic: August 26, 2009

Aidan has done a great job with our vacation journal (as usual) so I thought he deserves a break – at least for a day. That said, we spent Wednesday close to our home base doing that relaxing thing that all vacations should include. After another amazing breakfast (the best scrambled eggs I have ever had and don’t let me start on the sausages), we decided to head to the market for some fresh bread. We’ve wanted to do this for a few days now but always seemed to get caught up with mapping routes to our destination of the day or dealing with emails. We headed to Tescos and they were just putting out the bread for the day. The smell was amazing. Aidan picked out a nice warm rye loaf while I got some Eidam cheese. Lunch would be a treat!

On our way back we visited Obchodni Dum, which translates literally into ‘department store’. It looks like an office building and as you get closer, you can see curtains in the windows which makes you think it may be an apartment building. When you enter, you see that it is 6 floors of stores, ranging from electronics to fabrics, crystal to furniture. All of the shops are separate and divided by what appear to be cubicle walls. It is next to the University of Tomas Bata (named for the shoemaker who set up his company in Zlin) so it is very busy. We walked up each flight of steps and discovered the variety that the department store had to offer. The Bohemian crystal caught our eyes and we spent time in the fabric and yarn shop since you don’t see that much at home anymore.

We headed back to the Penzion Uno but had to defer lunch a bit because our room was being serviced. We took a short walk down another one of the residential streets in our neighborhood. The houses and gardens in this area are so beautiful. This street allowed us to also see the full extent of the orchard that is next to our hotel. I ate a few plums off of one of the trees that was on the road and they were the sweetest plums I’ve ever eaten. In addition to the many varieties of apple trees, we saw blackberry bushes and a few peach trees (not in season), a walnut tree and what I assume were black currants.

Lunch was lazy with the rye bread and cheese. We finished off most of the loaf and followed that with some fruit. Afterwards we went back out to walk it off. There are walking trails in the woods that are further up the hill. We walked past lots of new construction and then apartment buildings before we got to a field that had many trails leading into various parts of the woods. People were walking their dogs or walking around with their kids. People are so fit here so I was not surprised to see so many people walking about. We took the first trail and it appeared that someone had been there to re-cut the trail. We came across a manger and a lookout for hunters. The second trail took us into woods covered with blackberry bushes and other types of fruits. The third trail led us to an apple orchard. I counted at least 6 varieties of apples in the orchard. The last trail was truly the woods. People were cooking food using campfires in areas that had been cleared, sitting on logs that had been placed there for that purpose. We looked at the trees that appeared to be ‘tapped’ for their sap but weren’t that sure about the types of trees that we were looking at. We followed the trail until we got to the main road and then walked back to our hotel. Again, we admired the gardens and window boxes of the people in the neighborhood.

The evening was another quiet one. Our laundry was delivered (160 KC or $9 for 3kg of laundry washed, dried & folded) and we went to the town square to find dinner for the evening. We walked around a few of the shops and ended up going for fast food for the evening.