Land of Shoes and Slivovice

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And finally. You can't imagine how good it felt, after 4 long, heavy weeks of being tied up in Prague, to collapse into an empty compartment of a rychlik and zip down the corridor again. I'm simply not used to being in this country and not travelling. Just to add a thick layer of icing on the cake, Jitka and I had the compartment to ourselves the entire 3 hour journey to Otrokovice, where we changed onto a little train to Zlín, her home city.

Zlín could be renowned for a few reasons. Firstly it was the home of Austro-Hungarian entepreneur Tomáš Baťa, who made shoes, and whose name is still used by the same company he founded in its modern multi-national guise. Although the Baťa company has nothing to do with Zlín anymore, the city still carries a large amount of his contributions to it. Baťa basically built most of the city, from rows of tiny půldomky to towering office blocks and warehouses, all in the rather peculiar "functionalist" style, which could have been the architectural predecessor to the bland, depressing models of tower blocks which swept over Europe after WW2. From above, the city would look something like a huge, snowy piece of electronic circuitry, with rows and rows of the same construction linked together by trolleybus-lined streets.

The closest you can get to such a view without attempting a rather perious skydive is from the top of the largest of the functionalist circuit chips, Building Number 21, which now serves as the headquarters and financial offices of the Zlín region, but is open to the public with a terrace on the very top floor. You can reach the summit either by a normal lift, or by a quite interesting constantly moving pulley lift where you simply step on and step off from one of its many cabins whenever you need to. Baťa's influence on Zlín also still remains pretty obvious, as not only is everything built in his style, everything still remains for his purpose - Obouváme svět - we put shoes on the world. There are five times more fashion shops in this city than food stores.

Zlín is also the capital of the Valašsko region, which no longer officially exists, but has a rich history and is culturally placed somewhere between Moravia and Slovakia, left to ferment, distilled and diluted down to a perfect 52% volume and enjoyed in shots. Literally everything around here probably revolves in some way around slivovice, or something else ending in -ovice. My stay in Zlín was largely spent viewing various flats with Jitka as she was looking for somewhere to live there after moving from the UK, and dashing to a wifi café all the time to check my TEFL result. However, she rather quickly moved into a flat on tuesday, and afterwards, we took a trip to her grandparents' house to pick up some essentials. During our 30 minutes there, they fed us three shots of home-made slivovice - one for the left leg, one for the right leg, and then the purpose of the third shot is disputed between "for the middle leg", or the slightly more gender neutral "for the journey".

Before Jitka rather swiftly found her rather cute flat in the centre of the city, we spent the first night in the home of her parents, a village called Šarovy which basically consisted of one road, a pub and a load of houses some 20 minutes by bus from Zlín, where her mum took care of us for the evening. This plus the visit to her grandparents plus helping her cousin move her stuff over the evening after finding the flat meant that I have really been testing my Czech all week for the first time properly. And this weekend this will continue as we move north into Jesenické Hory to stay with Jitka's brother and his girlfriend, neither of whom speak English. I'm really enjoying this, as I rarely get an opportunity to really use Czech in Prague.

I became quite attached to Zlín in my short stay there. It really has a sense of closeness to it, that no matter where you are in the city you always have a view of the same towers, and the same sídliště on one side and the rows of půldomky on the other complemented by the deep forests behind them. Never is anything completely hidden by narrow alleys piled with the 5 story bohemian houses which pile the streets of Prague or Brno. It's literally like living in a game of Sim City.

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Photos

Functionalist WTF factor
WTF is the point of that mini-staircase???