A review of what went on during the rail trip, which took us from Prague to Ljubljana between the 15th and 31st of December 2004.


15th Dec (Wed) Prague

We'd actually been to Prague before, a year back. So this was like a revisit, tying up loose ends, and also catching the city in a different season.

We visited the Strahov Monastery and the Loreta (basically, stuff we'd missed out), walked along the lovely Vltava once again. Got some great shots of the Charles Bridge. Freakishly cold when we got there actually. We stayed in Pension Unitas, which was converted from a prison, where ex-President Vaclav Havel was imprisoned. So that's some neat bit of history.

We bumped into the same lady that sold us bus tickets a year ago at the airport. She's still there after these months. She had swindled us then, when she gave us change for our tickets. Just threw us a handful of coins, which we couldn't count quick enough at first to realise the trick. This time, we gave her smaller notes. LESS change to count.

Our meal policy throughout the trip is to stinge on lunch and have a decent sit-down dinner. So, lunches were predominated by supermarket take-aways e.g. buns, breadloaves, canned tuna, cheese, fruits, juice. Our 1st dinner, though, was a flop, no thanks to the extremely rude waiters at a particular restaurant. In the end, we settled for KFC. Great start. Probably we left dinner till too late in the evening, where reservations are required. So, we learnt to take early dinners. And for completeness sake, we've decided to keep track of our posh dinners: wj had a 2 pc chicken meal and i had a salad. Couldn't stomach the thought of eating chicken that early in the trip. Had bad experiences with fastfood overdose.


16th Dec (Thu) Kutna Hora

Took a train to this small, mining town. We stayed at this quaint little pension, which was really cheap! 10 pounds for an en-suite room with TV. That was really the best bargain of the trip. We caught a bit of Czech TV; it was a game show, where one of the players was really good. One of the contestants he played against was Jaroslav, can't recall the other person's name though.

Probably the main attraction of the town is the Bone Church. The church holds a large collection of human bones which are used to decorate the interior. A chandelier and various structures made of bones. Interestingly, we found out that if you wanted to take photos, you needed to buy a photo ticket, on top of the admission ticket - the first time i've seen such a thing. Hmm, so we were crafty, and bought 2 normal tickets and 1 photo ticket. So we only took photos with 1 camera and shared the photos. OK, not that the attendant really kept tabs on us.

For dinner that night, we had it at the diner's next to our pension. The nice waitress tried translating the menu for us. Well, it did work out, although what arrived was not necessarily what we'd imagined. WJ had garlic soup with toasted bread, some chicken paprika thing. I had chicken soup with maggi-like noodle strands (a recurring item in soups for the next few meals), and extremely salty chicken chops. The mushroom sauce was the culprit!

Night time entertainment: we watched TV!! They screened a film in English - "The Dancer Upstairs", which was about revolution in Argentina. Erm, a John Malkovich film. It was not terribly good. The talking was mumbled, very hard to catch them. Plus the heavily-inflected accent.


17th Dec (Fri) Brno

Another train ride onwards to Brno, the provincial capital of Moravia. The city where Mendel conducted his pea crossing experiments. Had a walk around a couple of churches in the city, and climbed up the Spilberk castle. It had snowed the night before, and the grounds were dangerousy laced with ice, which made climbing a silly idea to do. It probably had to do with the cold and the wind, we were ravenous (after having skimpy lunches for 3 days). Succumbed to the charms of 'Mama Snacks'. This little shop sold little cheese bites. Bought 10 of those, had no idea what they were actually, at least they only cost 50 pence.

We then stopped by an art gallery, where the lady at the ticket counter was exuberant. She kept on rattling in czech, even when i mentioned kindly that we don't understand you. It was an interesting collection of 3 artists, one of whom is a chinese who does lots of family trees/faces thing, superimposed with chinese characters. Another artist drew abstracts of zodiac signs, which i could only make out, thanks to the labels on the side.

For dinner that night, we had it in the restaurant, at the ground floor of our hotel. I had carp. Yet again another bony fish. What's with all these freshwater fish, together with potato pancakes. Weijian had onion soup, followed by pork, dumplings and sauerkraut. The interesting thing that happened was a lady came over and asked if she could take 2 of the chairs at our table. We said yes, and off she went. A few moments later, the waiter appeared with the 2 chairs and placed them back. Surprised! The lady then came back, hunting for the 2 chairs. And took them off again.

Shrek 1 was on TV that night, albeit in czech. Breakfast the next morning was fantastic, for it was, for once, a hot breakfast. Eggs on ham.