Southern Moravia - A Field Trip


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September 20th 2006
Published: September 20th 2006
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This past weekend, I went on a field trip to Southern Moravia, the southeastern part of the Czech Republic that borders Slovakia and Austria. It is a beautiful region of rolling hills, pine-covered mountains, pastoral villages, country estates, vineyards, and quaint mountain-top towns.

We started the trip at 7:45 on Friday morning in a Soviet-era (AKA gross) bus: twenty students, a few staff members from the university, an art historian, and my Czech teacher. Everyone else went back to sleep when we started moving, but I had to stay awake to read poems for my atrocious postwar poetry class (more on my classes in a later blog...). I'm actually kind of glad I had the work because it forced me to stay awake and allowed me to see the beautiful Czech countryside. The towns we passed through seem almost completely untouched by modern society, aside from the few random beer and Coke signs that dot the storefronts. Our first stop was in the Church of St. John of Nepomuk on Zelena Hora ("Green Hill"). St. John of Nepomuk was a fourteenth-century priest who was thrown off Charles Bridge by the emperor when he refused to reveal the confessions of the queen. Supposedly, centuries after his death, people went into his tomb and found that his tongue was still alive and pumping blood, and he was allowed to become a saint because of this miracle... crazy Catholics! The church on the hill is a cool mix of Gothic and Baroque architecture, and it is built in the shape of a star and surrounded by cloisters which are built in the shape of a ten-point star. Unfortunately, like so many of the places we visited this weekend, the church was under renovation, and much of the church (including the painting of St. John's tongue on the ceiling of the rotunda) was covered by scaffolding.

Later that day, we arrived in Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic. Despite its size, it had a small-town feel, free from the tourists and traffic of similarly-sized cities. For a quick lunch, we attempted to get pizza... let me warn you now if you are ever in Brno - don't get pizza! In Prague, the pizza is very good - crispy crust, fresh toppings, and all-around good stuff. In Brno, they hand you a slab of bread with melted cheese and ask, "Ketchup?" If you don't react quickly enough, they squirt a layer of ketchup all over the top. Gross! And I want to make it clear that this was not just one place. We walked past multiple pizza places, and they all looked like this. Luckily, I saw my friends get their pizzas before I had to order, so I got a "cheeseburger." It ended up being a bun with a giant mozzarella stick and mayo on it. Surprisingly good, but definitely not a cheeseburger!

To give you some idea of the foods that are popular in Brno, I took a picture of an ad in a store window of a cake made out of salami, deviled eggs, and olives, which were put into the shape of a cake and covered in a giant layer of gelatin. They even had the nerve to put a "50" candle on the top of it! One delicious thing in Brno is a drink called burchak, which is essentially "young wine." It is the cloudy, frothy crap that is skimmed off the top of wine before it goes through its final fermentation. It tastes like apple cider, but supposedly has the same alcohol content as wine. The chaperones warned everyone that it would be really easy to get really drunk on something that tastes really good (the margarita principle?), and luckily no one went too crazy.

After lunch, we went on a tour of Spilberk Castle, formerly the most brutal prison in the whole Hapsburg Empire. We toured the dungeons, which might sound cool, but is really not at all. Before coming to Prague, the closest I had gotten to a dungeon/cave/anything-underground-surrounded-by-rocks is the line in Pirates of the Caribbean. Since getting here, I have been in the Budapest labyrinth, the Vysehrad dungeons, the Moravian caves, the Spilberk dungeons... it is honestly getting a little old already. After the dungeons, we went to Vila Tugendhat, a modernist house built in 1928. It is supposed to be an architectural masterpiece, but... eh. It was allowed to lose most of its luster in the Communist era and is currently being prepared for refurbishment. Rooms are empty of the furniture which defined the house's modernist outlook, paint is cracking off the walls, other rooms are locked completely to the public... it's all a little sad. I would love to come back when the renovations are completed, because I'm sure the house will be really awesome in about five years.

The next day, we went to the Punkava Caves, a huge system of caverns in the Moravian woods. Being in a cave was so surprisingly cool! The rock formations look almost fake because of their contorted shapes and smooth exteriors. One highlight of the trip was the Macocha Abyss. At one point while walking through the caves, you see daylight shoot through the dim light, and you emerge at the bottom of the abyss, an enormous collapsed cave system. It is essentially an enormous hole in the ground, lined with trees and rocks. At the bottom is a blue-green pond that is supposedly over 150 feet deep. The whole situation has sort of a Promised Land vibe to it, as they pipe this random chanting out of speakers as you walk into the abyss... I can't remind the last time I heard a collective "Ooooooh!" this loud. After the abyss, we went on a boat ride on an underground river through the caves. It was very dark and eery, but definitely an amazing experience.

Following the caves, we went to this random restaurant in the Moravian countryside which was started some time in the 1800s by the first Czech woman to publish a cookbook. The restaurant was small and rustic, with walls covered in animal skins, antlers, and random animal heads. The food took literally two hours to prepare (trust me, I checked my watch a lot... we were starving!), but it was really delicious. I had grilled duck breast with plum sauce and side salad with red currants. So good.

After lunch, we drove to Mikulov, a small hilltop town on the Austrian border where we stayed for the night. We went on a tour of some of the city's highlights: the Jewish cemetery, the synagogue, the town square, and the Liechtenstein Chateau. Since I love random things, my favorite part of the trip was probably seeing the second largest barrel in Central Europe in the chateau basement. Picture keeping a straight face as a Czech tour guide announces, "And here we have Central Europe's second largest barrel"... In the evening, we met up with some Czech students from the region. It was cool to be able to talk to Czech people from outside of the major city. I was very impressed with their English, and it just made me realize that the American system of teaching languages does not work at all!

The next morning, I woke up about two hours before everyone else and walked around the city at sunrise by myself so I could take some good pictures. It was so peaceful and beautiful (and kind of a treat to not hear everyone saying, "You're taking ANOTHER picture?!"). Our first stop for that day was Lednice, a summer palace of the Liechtenstein family. It is a beautiful country estate built in the English Gothic style. The grounds of the estate are manicured like Versailles. Beyond the gardens is a huge park with man-made lakes, an island with sheep, willow trees, and swans. In addition, a number of random features were added (such as a ruined castle, a Roman aqueduct, and the largest minaret outside of the Muslim world) to serve as a fantasy landscape for the family that lived there. We climbed to the top of the minaret, which was immensely tall - so tall, in fact, that you could see Slovakia, Austria, and the Alps from the top. As I am insanely afraid of heights, it was pretty freaking scary. I went outside on the balcony anyway, but I think if I stayed out there for longer than the few minutes I was there, I could have faced a Tony-Soprano-style panic-attack moment.

Our last stop in Southern Moravia was the town of Telc. It has a beautifully preserved Renaissance town square that looks more like a movie set than real life (think "Romeo and Juliet"). All the houses are different pastel colors - pinks, yellows, blues. We arrived at sunset to see the last rays hit the buildings in an awesome display of light and color.

The weekend in Southern Moravia was a peaceful and rustic alternative to the non-stop action of life in Prague, and I am so glad that I finally got to see what I would consider the real Czech Republic.





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26th September 2006

pizza
I'll never look at pizza the same again.

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