part dva (two)

(It's my birthday today. More on that later-)

I'd rather not spend too much time commenting on the negative aspects of Slavonice, but I must mention an instance where our contact person gave us a very vague "trail" to follow and we ended up wandering through haystacks and dirt roads and flat fields of the Sudetenland, encountering a group of local boys at one point and truly understand the phrase "no man's land." On Wednesday we visited Telc, another UNESCO city, which was quite pretty but it was a day full of rain and therefore a lot of sitting in cafes drinking videnska kava.

The other girl and I left Slavonice on Thursday, which was quite an endeavor. We had initially planned to take a bus straight to Budejovice, but Czech-style, it never showed up. There was another English-speaking traveler--an architect from Portugal--waiting for the same bus, and we ended up going with her to the Telc train station where we proceeded to travel for six hours on five different trains to get to Budejovice. I didn't think it was humanly possible to take so many trains in one day, but there you have it, and definitely a full view of the southern Czech countryside.

Finally we arrived in Budejovice and met up with another student who had also traveled there early and proceeded to have a veritable feast at an Indian restaurant. We had to specifically ask for spicy food because they usually cater to the Czech (read: bland) palate and it was delicious--mattar paneer, naan and kulfi made it a good night except maybe for the rain.

The next day in the early afternoon the three of us went to the Budweiser brewery for a tour (not American Budweiser, which is pretty awful, but the real Czech stuff) which was very interesting and smelled like bread and was full of free samples. I even ran into some Israelis and, ridiculously excited, talked to them in Hebrew.

Anyways, I'm twenty, and it's time for me to go to bed and continue blogging later.