Summer Abroad in Prague: Český Krumlov

A couple days ago I got back from my 5 day trip to Český Krumlov, Vienna, Budapest, and Bratislava. We first went to Český Krumlov which is in the southern Bohemia of the Czech Republic. When we visited there was a huge Renaissance fair going on. It's not like the ones in the United States. They had a huge parade, cute stands, rides, fire breathing people, and fireworks. Their outfits were amazing. They were not some Renaissance looking costumes from Party City, they looked historically accurate and intricate. They even had historically accurate shoes and hats. I was only there for one night and left for Vienna the next morning. While I was there we went to a famous castle and theater. The castle had all the furniture still in it and all the portraits. It is the most accurate, well kept castle in Europe. There were even detailed records of where the furniture was so they could represent how it would have looked when it was still being used. Our tour guide was American. I wonder if he vacationed here, fell in love with the town, never left and became a tour guide. I like the tour guides in Europe, they can be pretty blunt and not politically accurate all the time. There were portraits of the Royals that lived in the castle. One the tour guide pointed out one and talked about the person. He said something like, "There was a lot of inbreeding of the powerful aristocrats because they wanted to keep up in the royal society. In this portrait of the girl, you can see the effects of inbreeding, she doesn't look too good." He also pointed out a picture of a woman who lived in the castle for awhile and she was considered the typical beauty of her time. The tour guide pointed out how the times had changed, she's definitely not considered beautiful by today's standards.

Around the castle there was a moat filled with bears. When our social directors told us to meet by the bear moat, I was expecting a moat with statues of bears or something, I really had no clue what they were talking about. That's one bad thing about the trip, our directors gave horrible, vague descriptions of how to get to places and what we were going to do. They'd tell us to go to the bear moat and we'd be like what? How do we get there? And they'd say you see that tall tower? Just head that way. And then it'd be rainy, you get lost because you can't see the tower from all places, the parade is clogging up all the streets, you can't find the bridge to cross the river and your tired and hungry and crabby and your late for the tour. Your friends are all following you cause they'd rather not have the responsibility even though you have no clue what your doing. You finally make it to the tower and your like where the hell is this so called bear moat. Other than that it was a lot of fun and very beautiful.

Oh I wanted to point out something random. I had an amazing dinner at a restaurant and our waiter was funny. We ordered deserts, apple pies, and he asked jokingly if we wanted ketchup on it. I guess Americans are known for liking to put ketchup on everything. Of course we do, ketchup is awesome and makes everything taste better. It goes great with the wienershnitzel, europeans shouldn't see it as a taboo to put it on things. I even talked to Ini and Pezi in Vienna about this. They were my family's past exchange students. They told be about this time when some friends came in from England or something and they went out to eat with them and one asked for ketchup to put on her eggs. They were sooo embarressed and horrified! I guess they have never heard of ketchup and eggs. I don't see why it's such a taboo when it's soo good.

Here are some pictures I took of Český Krumlov: