My Travel Adventures

Ninth week at Oxford – a time when classes cease to meet and some exams are held – is a time when the mad gallop of the year slows down to a trot. Many people either party or try to leave early, and some even manage to do both. With the weight of schoolwork lifted from my shoulders, I ate a few long meals with course-mates and visited the botanic garden with a friend before the consequences of the omnipresent carefree atmosphere inevitably caught up with us. My housemate tested positive for covid, which forced us all into isolation for several days. Luckily, the contagion stopped there, which meant that no one else’s travel plans were impacted. However, the happy send-offs I was eagerly expecting would not happen.

Given how busy the terms are at Oxford, both this post and the last have been backdated. I wrote them while sitting at home in the Czech Republic on the 20 th of December, occasionally dodging my memory by consulting the photographs still on my hard drive (goodness, I really need to migrate those to my external hard drives already).

School terms at Oxford are nasty, brutish, and short. In contrast to Yale’s twelve weeks of instruction (with two weeks of break somewhere in between and one week of exams towards the end), they last a mere eight. Logically speaking, this equates to around 24 weeks of instruction per year in both cases, but these feel very different. During my last two years at Yale, I wrote the bulk of my papers during the holidays and had time during the semester to eat long meals with friends and participate in extracurriculars. At Oxford, this buffer is gone. Every week is a mad dash towards the sweet release of the upcoming holiday season, and there is barely enough time to do any one thing well.   

It is difficult, only a week after my departure from the Czech Republic, to try to recollect the events of that day – so much has happened since then! However, one thing does stand out in my memory in a way that only unpleasant experiences do: having forgotten to fill in a passenger locator form at home, I had to make a frantic dash through the multiple pages of the form on my phone before I was allowed to check in.

The pictures below are from a trip I made to the city hall in my hometown Beroun. At the time, I was making my first attempt to get a voting pass so I could vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections from the Czech Embassy in London. To my surprise and consternation, I found out I was still registered to vote in New York, which necessitated me to formally request my removal from their list. Luckily, the workers of the Consulate in New York were very responsive, and I was able to pick up my voting pass in Beroun only several days later. Note for the future: unless planning to settle somewhere long-term, get a voting pass!

My last trip before departing for Oxford took me to the north of Central Bohemia again. Our first destination was the mountain Říp, though our first stop was the side of a road about ten kilometres away from it. The dog, who had apparently not been walked very thoroughly in the morning, began to prepare for a bowel movement inside the car, which necessitated an immediate emergency stop.

This weekend was presumably the year’s last warm and sunny weekend. Our family used the occasion to pay a visit to a relation near the northern city Liberec, where we gathered blueberries and mushrooms and made merry. The hills in the borderlands are very peaceful, and much of our visits consist of sitting on a terrace talking about how quiet it is.

On my last day in Texas, my dad drove me to the town of Palestine for my friends’ (note the location of the apostrophe) wedding. The ceremony was beautiful, though I am admittedly a poor judge, as this was the first time I stayed for the entire event. Continuing a decades-long tradition, members and alumni of the Yale Russian Chorus sang the medieval Georgian hymn Shen Khar Venakhi as the bride and groom were taking communion. I was told we sounded good, though I am not sure whether that was merely said out of politeness.  

We spent our second day in Texas immersing ourselves in a tourist-friendly version of its culture. After eating breakfast in Fort Worth, we toured the historic centre of the city, which is quite walkable and has some interesting art deco buildings. We also drove down to the Water Gardens.

After our fourteen obligatory days in Mexico, we were deemed purged of all potential diseases by the US government, which permitted us to enter without much ado. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever made it into the country with as much ease, which is ironic considering we are at the height of another pandemic surge.

Anticipating a slightly delayed opening time, we arrived at the gates of Uxmal at 8:10. The early visit was a good idea, as during the hour we spent there, we saw fewer than a dozen people (and half of them were employees of the site). Much of what can be seen at Uxmal today was built throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, during the Late Classic Maya period, but the city was allegedly founded over three hundred years earlier. Legend has it that the main pyramid (or the “Adivino”) was built by the mythical Dwarf King overnight.

Travelling in the era of COVID sometimes feels a lot like a game of “the floor is lava.” Entering the US from the EU is prohibited (except to US citizens and EU holders of several specific types of visas), which means that anyone truly desirous of getting there must spend two weeks in a third country – the rule of the game being that after fourteen days in a different country, the restrictions no longer apply.

Not long after returning from Bavaria, my sister and I began to make plans for a weekend trip to Poland. We were joined by her best friend from high school, who, having heard about our successful road trip, was likely not expecting this one to be an utter disaster.

Not long after my sister returned from her “studies” in Chicago, we embarked on our long-planned trip to our southern neighbours. Setting off on Monday, we made good use of two Czech holidays (Saints Cyril and Methodius day on the 5 th and the Immolation of Jan Hus on the 6 th ) to enjoy our stay in Austria during the work week.

It has been unbearably hot these past few days, which made travel to the occasional work meeting and scholarship interview rather unpleasant. Nevertheless, a tourist-less summer is when Prague is at its most beautiful.

The excursion we made this Sunday was rather megalomaniacal for a day trip. We started in Cheb, one of the westernmost towns in the Czech Republic and a two hours’ drive from Prague . More German than Czech in its architecture, Cheb offers some rather unique sights, which include a colourful block of buildings with outer wooden beams nicknamed Špalíček (“the little chopping block”) or an almost entirely black castle tower.

Given the absence of travel, my amusements have been quite provincial lately. Every now and then, I will take a long walk and end up above Svatý Jan, and on truly special days, I get to visit the capital. I must not indulge myself too frequently though, for my atrophied, provincial mind feels overwhelmed by such visits, and I feel exhausted for days.

I hate driving. I hate driving a lot. I especially hate driving large cars down narrow provincial roads. Now obviously, since I have lived to tell the tale, the story of how my sister and I got to Průhonice by evading the D5 highway on a Monday morning is not one with very high stakes, nor is it much of a tale anyhow. Suffice it to say, there were about three moments when I thought we were going to die: First, when a bus unexpectedly lurched towards us from behind the bend on a narrow village road; second, when I was trying to evade a car by veering so far to the right that our right-hand wheels ended up in a ditch; and third, when I steered us back onto the road from said ditch and almost ended up colliding with a car coming from the opposite direction.

One of the more bizarre sights in our neighbourhood is a “pseudo-menhir” that was erected near the village Mořinka on the 31 st of December 1999. Likely due to the momentousness of the date (I believe I previously shared my thoughts about nitpickers who make a big deal over the correct demarcation of decades/centuries/millennia, and I simply do not care), the authors allegedly used the occasion to hide messages for future generations under the rock. A few years later, the menhir was joined by a concrete armchair.

A frequent topic of many conversations this year is just how cold the weather has been. Even the trees seem to be growing leaves much later than they usually do. It has also been quite rainy, so despite the improving public health situation, we have not made too many trips. I have been expending most of my photographic energy in the garden.

For reasons unknown to me, my dad decided to buy bumblebees. Even more incomprehensibly, he decided to buy them in Brno, a city two hundred kilometres away. While I have yet come to comprehend why exactly we need Moravian bumblebees, this strange purchase did have one upside – we got to make a trip to the second largest city in the Czech Republic, a city I had never visited before.

The weather was beautiful this weekend, so my sister and I, as well as a billion other tourists, made an excursion to Tet ín. Tetín is primarily known for its association with the mythical figure Teta, as well as Saint Ludmila and the chronicler V áclav Hájek z Libočan. We did not visit any of the historical sites in Tet ín besides the ruins of an ancient castle (the main churches are, at any rate, under reconstruction right now), and continued down a tortuous forest path towards the Tetín waterfall. The waterfall turned out to be more of a trickle, but that did not make the climb any less formidable. I clambered down the rock while holding my dog in one hand and holding onto a chain with the other, occasionally putting the dog down and descending a few paces before picking her up again. We walked as far as Srbsko, where we crossed the bridge and returned home.  

At my sister’s request (one could also call it incessant badgering), we made a short impromptu trip to the castle Krakovec in Rakovník District. The castle is more of a ruin and is not remarkable for much besides starring in a couple of films and being one of the last places where Jan Hus preached before his fateful departure for Konstanz.

My dad had an errand to run near Roudnice nad Labem, a town about fifty kilometres north of Prague. Since he knows the area well, he took me and my sister to visit some sights along the way.

I was under the impression that Easter happened quite late this year, since I distinctly remember how cold it used to be when, as children, we used to traverse the neighbourhood asking for eggs and treats. I was, therefore, surprised to learn that April  4 th  is the earliest date Easter has been celebrated since 2018, and that Easter fell on a March date only five times in the last twenty years. I suppose time feels very drawn out during global pandemics.

I cannot remember when the quasi-lockdown was put in place, nor can I remember when it was eased to allow travel within the same district. Confined within this tiny area, I have mostly been thinking about work and the future. I wrote some, researched some, and perhaps most importantly, I made a final decision on my grad school offers. Other than that, these past few weeks have been completely unremarkable, except for spring entering full swing. Below are some of the pictures I took during my many excursions to the forest (and our garden).

Beginning March 1 st , drastic travel restrictions have been in place to curb the spread of covid. One cannot leave one’s town except to buy groceries, and one cannot leave one’s district except for work. The government has essentially done everything short of declaring a nation-wide lockdown, partly because the Prime Minister promised last year that there would be no more lockdowns, and partly because the government is dumber than a group of thirteen doorknobs. While it has ordered people to stay at home, it has refused to close factories and has not made workplace testing mandatory. Even worse, there appears to be no plan to make contact tracing more effective for when cases eventually do decline, which means that we will be back at square one as soon as restrictions are lifted again.

Two days after our visit to Průhonice, I was needed for some more logistical assistance, so we combined the drudgery with a few excursions. My dad and I drove to Konopiště Chateau, one of the most famous castles in Central Bohemia and noteworthy for a number of important residents. Konopiště was built in the late thirteenth century and has since gone through a number of renovations in various architectural styles. Its most famous residents included the Šternberks, Albrecht of Valdštějn, the Lobkovitces, and Franz Ferdinand. Frederick V of the Palatinate (the Winter King) briefly stayed at the castle during the Bohemian Revolt of 1618-20, the event that started the Thirty Years’ War.

My parents decided to buy new cars, the retrieval of which became a complex, multi-day logistical operation involving a disproportionate number of people. Since I was tasked with bringing one of the cars home, my dad took the opportunity to show me Průhonice Chateau, which I had never visited despite its proximity to Prague.

The weather remained very pretty for the rest of the weekend, so I convinced my dad and my sister to go on a trip in the direction of Plzeň. I did not bother to convince my dog, of course, but took her anyway. The first place we visited were the castles Točník and Žebrák, which my sister and I made a brief excursion to last year in much worse weather (it was so foggy that it was impossible to see either of the castles from many of the places where I took pictures today). Unlike last time, the goats who live under Točník ventured out of their pens and showed their interest in visitors, which indicates that they are often given snacks. Despite the beautiful weather, we didn’t meet too many people.

It was very cold and snowy this past week, but the sun came out on Friday and the promise of getting to take pictures of snowy landscapes under blue skies became irresistible. I climbed up to the lookout above Svatý Jan only to find it still in the shade of the surrounding hills as late as 10 AM. I decided to continue all the way to Karl štejn via Hostím and Srbsko.

I was visiting an old friend near Vinohrady, which is a neighbourhood I seldom visit because it is quite removed from the historic centre of Prague and because the walk up the hill is not very pleasant. However, it is a place worth seeing for the beautiful facades of many residential buildings.

This Sunday we explored the north of Central Bohemia, namely the Mělník and Mladá Boleslav regions. We started in the city Mělník, where we viewed the city’s chateau, as well as the chateau in the nearby town of Hořín. One interesting fact about the city is that while it was still a castle, Mělník chateau served as the residence of kings’ widows.

I wrote about my visit to Křivoklát Castle in October, but what I neglected to mention is that the castle is at the heart of an eponymous protected landscape area nestled between the D5 and the D6 highways, which lead from Prague to Pilsen and Karlovy Vary, respectively.

The first proper snow days of winter have arrived. On Thursday, I walked my dog through the snowy fields above my house. On Friday, we visited the riverside.