johnguzdek

As seems to be the case with my holidays at the moment, my trip with Maeve, the girlfriend, to Munich and Bavaria was a success despite God’s best attempts to ruin it. You can’t break me, God – I am Job! The first day was a good start though as the weather was quite sunny and much better than the Hurricane Günter that we had been expecting. Wandering around Munich's Old Town it's obvious that the city goes about things with understated beauty and rarely does seems to beg for your attention and this is definitely not a bad thing. Mainly there’s the ornate town hall in the roomy main square with the longest cuckoo clock routine I’ve ever been lucky enough to walk away from. Other than that it’s generally just full of spread out ... read more

Mine and James's foolproof plan: rent a car and drive around 10 hours from Prague to Slovenia and then on to Croatia, all with the aim of soaking up the sun on the beaches and around the lakes we’d heard so much about. We set off at 11 in a lovely shiny, new Seat Ibiza and after a couple of hours of hazard free driving things were going well. Especially well as my British handicap of being used to driving on the right (that is to say, correct) side of the road, had only led me to one near-fatal roundabout accident so far. Until Austria that is. At some point in the mammoth stretch between Vienna and Klagenfurt (a random dot on the map in the south of Austria that represented hope and achievement) we were ... read more

I’ve been living in Prague for fourteen months now and it’s still a bit strange to think of going back to England as a holiday. I went home at the weekend for a wedding of an old friend in the middle of nowhere in North Yorkshire. But it was also a great excuse to escape the urban sprawl of Prague and to visit some of friends and cheer myself up with some classic English countryside. It has been over a year since I saw my country in the sunshine. The last time I ventured back I brought my American friend who had the pleasure of experiencing the overwhelming greyness of a December in the UK and visits to the future UNESCO World Heritage Sites of the Riverside Stadium of Middlesbrough, the Manchester suburbs and Otley for ... read more

At the weekend I went walking In the Footsteps of Charles IV. Yes, the Charles IV of Holy Roman Emperor fame, Charlie-Boy. C-Bomb Number 4. No? Basically, I was apparently walking in the footsteps of a 14thcentury Czech king. In the Footsteps of Charles IV is an organised public walk outside of Prague to Karlstejn that’s put on every year for anyone who wants to do it. The full route is 50 kilometres but it’s possible to do 10, 15, 20 kilometres or whatever you can be bothered to do. As a group of occasional walkers and hardcore gulash eaters, we did 15 kilometres. By some miracle of human perseverance I pulled myself out of my comfortable, under-used bed at 8am and with my flatmate met a gaggle of similarly hungover looking people at ... read more

Ever since being teargassed at a bad-tempered Prague derby in 2008 I’ve been hooked on watching football in Europe. It’s much less sanitised - for better or worse - than England and always offers something interesting, if not always on the pitch. I’ve experienced the electric atmosphere of the San Siro in Milan, Hertha Berlin at the impressive Olympicstadion and the rustic charm of Artmedia Bratislava in a cowshed in Slovakia and I hope to see a lot more football action in the future. On Saturday, it was again the Prague derby of the city's main rivals, Slavia and Sparta. This year’s contest didn’t really look like it was going to be a classic with Slavia underperforming after some crippling financial difficulties and Sparta sitting pretty on top of the league. And, in the end, it ... read more