My Travel Adventures

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.