Krásně různých Praha

Alright, wonderful, beautiful, incredibly different Prague; let’s go! (two weeks late)

Our time at the farm in the Czech Republic passed fairly quickly, and on the day we left we were off to Prague to spend the day there sightseeing, an evening in the same hotel Jon stayed in during his first visit last year, a wonderful breakfast, and free wireless Internet!  YAY!  The day was very enjoyable, despite the torrential downpour and hail storm shortly after we finished eating lunch.  I always have the best luck with weather.  We did manage to stay mostly dry, and got to see all of the major hotspots; the Astronomical Clock, St. Charles Bridge, St. Vitus Cathedral, various things surrounding Prague Castle.  We did however miss out on Prague Castle.  By the time we got there, realized you needed to buy a ticket, bought a ticket, and went through a few of the other things it included, the exhibits were closing for the day and we didn’t have time to see the castle.  We were planning on going the following morning before taking our train out to Berlin, but we were pretty tuckered out from the night before and didn’t do much else except enjoy our breakfast.

Alright, so the reason we missed out on the castle our second morning is because we attempted a pub tour the evening before.  What I mean by “attempted” is that we paid the admission, spent the first two hours of it in a rather small, uninspired backpackers bar in the bottom of what used to be a church drinking rather terrible (but unlimited) alcohol only to find that it was raining cats and dogs when we went to leave for the second pub.  Probably three-quarters of the way to pub two we decided we were much too cold, much too wet, and much too sore-footed to continue, so we walked back to the hotel, crawled into bed, and passed out.  Even if we had continued on with the rest of the tour, I have a feeling it was geared more towards backpackers looking to get drunk, rather than backpackers looking for a little dose of really neat history.  Oh well.  We did enjoy some nice conversation though, since the tour was also geared towards English speakers.

Given how difficult it is to get pictures up with limited Internet and time, I’m going to go ahead and let you readers know that I’ll be doing a huge picture post (or maybe several posts) at the end of this trip when I get home.  Since I now have a paper weight instead of a camera (don’t know how I managed to lose my charger), a lot of these pictures will be from Jon’s camera, either taken by myself or Jon.  So until I’m back stateside, you’ll just have reading to do.  Apologies in advance, but it’ll be worth the wait.

Neexistuje nic, jako je vaření klobásy na táborák.

Alright, it’s getting a little annoying starting every post with “sorry for the long absence”, but I’ve been learning on this trip that expecting every farm to have a large enough Internet data plan to host all of the blogging, Facebook and emailing we do is asking a lot.  But most of all I would like to apologize for promising you a second post the evening I was in Prague and not delivering.  The night was very interesting, to say the least, but I’ll fill you in on that when I get to it.

So I left off with us arriving in the Czech Republic.  We were picked up at the train station and brought back to the farm to find the people there very warm and welcoming.  The family who lived there was one Englishman, his Czech wife, and there two girls, 8 and 3.  There was another HelpX couple there was well from France, so we got to practice a little bit of all that French we learned!  We ended up being the resident translators for some things, which was a bit fun.

The day we arrived also happened to be Jon’s 23^rd birthday, and though he didn’t get to enjoy a draft in a pub in Prague like he had hoped, they did have a few beers that night, as well as a cake!  Coincidentally, they had been shooting for a magazine feature for their English Chocolate Cake recipe, so she had to bake two of them that day.  What luck!  We sang “Happy Birthday” and devoured the cake, or at least a good bit of it.  Delicious.

We spent two week on their farm, and since I would drowned you in all the little details, I’ll sum up what they had on their property, the bulk of our work, as well as the highlights of our experiences with the family.

The home they lived in was over 400 years old, and for about 2/3rds of it, unlivable.  They had just received an industrial sized band saw and planer thickness-er to us to make the entire upstairs of the home (currently all rafters) a livable space.  They have a lot of work ahead of them, but they plan to have it livable (not finished though) by Christmas.  Unfortunately, they spent the whole two weeks we were there waiting for the dust extraction system to make the job possible, so we weren’t able to help him put any of the large timbers through the saws to help him out.  Hopefully another HelpX-er or WOOFer will be joining them soon so he can finally get started!

This was definitely our first animal farm.  When we got there they had 5 goats (one of them a baby that spent its time in the back garden with us; I was quite fond of him), 4 mini-pigs, 4 mini-piglets, 4 rabbits, 3 chickens, 5(?) geese, 2 goslings, a very lovably Rottweiler named Sally and a cat whose name I never caught.  When we left, they had sold two of the goats, one of the piglets had died, someone they sold a rabbit to brought one back, and they acquired ten young chickens.  They required quite a bit of work, buy the twice daily goat milking blessed us with homemade goat cheese.  Yum!

For the majority of our stay we were adding on to an existing fence in the back garden.  They had just received 10 new chickens, and had to build up the fence high enough so that the chickens couldn’t get out, and the fox couldn’t get in.  It was a bit more difficult that it should have been because the existing fence wasn’t made very well.  The posts were random distances apart, which made finding wood long enough and cutting things to size a little time consuming.  We did however finish it on our second to last work day.

Almost every day (that it didn’t rain) we helped to water there rather beautiful and successful veggie garden.  I had my first radish (yum), and one evening we even had enough things harvested from the garden to make a salad from it (aside from the dressing).  Watering took a while, but fortunately for them they have a little spring that feeds a creek right by the garden, so you can fill up water in buckets right there.  The water also happened to have little tiny flecks of what looked like gold and silver.  We’re almost certain that’s what they were, but the amounts were so small that it would cost considerably more to get it out than you would make back with it.  On one of our work days we put in post for an electric fence on the property boundary, again for the foxes, wild boar and deer.  That job was particularly frustrating because the ground had a lot of clay in it, and there were a lot of very vicious biting flies.

As for our time off and the time spent with the family, it was very enjoyable.  The food was wonderful (though they eat a lot of fried food in this area of Europe, so I can’t say it was all as healthy as our salads), the conversation was great, and the atmosphere was very friendly.  I did however have to adjust to using an outdoor toilet for the first time, which was different to say the least.  Jon and I (Jon more than me) came to understand how awful stingy nettle is, and how it grows pretty much exactly where you don’t want it to.  We went on walks into the forests around their home and enjoyed being surrounded by real trees.  We learned a new word for rain boots, wellies, a new French card game that we plan on trying to find or create, and then turn it into a drinking game (it would be so much fun), we cooked sausages over the fire and had traditional Czech foods like langoše and enjoyed homemade breads and cake daily.  It was truly wonderful.

I’ll save our time spent in Prague for my next post, just to keep things from getting too long!

Buona liberazione, Italia

Sorry (again) for the long absence.  Italy didn’t really change all that much after my last post, and to be honest, I was quite frustrated by a lot of what we experienced that I didn’t feel it was all that necessary to tell you about it.  Let me just sum things up by saying that all we were really told to do was prune the olive grove.  It seemed like everyone else had at least some say in what they were doing, or given the opportunity to relay their strong points, skills and experience.  Not us.  Compound this with the fact that our host made several attempts at avoiding to talk to us directly (IE: sending someone else to tell us something just minutes after she was in the same room with us), we frequently overheard her refer to us as “the Americans” in an unpleasant tone (despite the fact that she very well knew our names), and a few other things; we didn’t feel very welcome, and we were very much looking forward to leaving.

Too bad leaving required the Italian train system, which failed to work smoothly, again.

Getting from Rapolano to Siena and then to Florence was cake.  It went smoothly, we got on our first train for free, and they were roughly on time.  We felt we were off to a good start.  That is, until we got to Florence and the 8:30 train we were hoping to catch from Florence to Venice was sold out.  All classes.  Thankfully the automated ticket thing was wrong when it said that all trains were sold out, and we were able to buy tickets for the 11:30 high-speed to Venice.  Now, all of you are going to cringe when you find out what we did during our time in Florence, but we spent it in the most comfortable chairs we could find, trading off naps.  It just happened to be in a McDonalds.  The Florence train station didn’t have any lockers, so even if we happened to have had the energy to walk around and explore, we would have had to do so with all our bags with us.  Thankfully the McCafe had some delicious fresh squeezed blood orange juice, and the time passed relatively quickly.

The train from Florence to Venice was relatively comfortable, but packed.  Since I was the one who napped the least, I had a very hard time staying awake on the train, but Jon managed to pass out.  Fortunately for us, I managed to only doze; otherwise we would have missed our stop.  We got off the train, were assaulted by the Venetian heat, and set off for the ticket booth to buy our ticket to Vienna, Austria.

Well, let me preface this by saying that we weren’t in the lovely, ancient, sightseeing-worthy area of Venice.  We were at Venice Mestre, which is on the mainland, probably 15-20 kilometers away from any sort of canal.  Well, after asking for the next train to Vienna, we received two tickets for the 9:18 train that evening… over 8 hours away.

8 hours, in not-so-lovely “new” Venice.  Seriously?  After finding this out, we set out to see exactly what we had to work with, and found that the most Italian thing there was several Chinese restaurants and (as always) a halal place serving really lousy pizza.  Thankfully for us though, there was a lovely restaurant in the hotel across the street from the train station that offered free WIFI use with the purchase of a beverage.  We sat there for the majority of our 8 hour layover, and then moved to the hotel lobby when the place was closing to get ready for dinner.  I was grateful they didn’t kick us out.  While sitting there I managed to overhear the front desk clerk tell someone that the trains will be going on strike that evening at 9PM.  They seriously couldn’t wait until after our train left?  So, when we returned to the train station to wait out the last hour before our train, we were a little worried, but hopeful, that maybe we overheard him incorrectly, and were wondering exactly what an “Italian train strike” might be.

Well, after a ten minute wait at our platform, we saw another train for another destination pull in.  We saw this as a good sign, since a strike would surely mean all trains, not just the ones going to Vienna.  After about half an hour, our train finally arrived, we found our cabin, got comfortable, watched a movie, and passed out.  We couldn’t afford to pay for a sleeper cabin, but we were fortunate to not have anyone else in our cabin the entire duration of the journey… all 11 hours of it.  So far, Austrian trains are my favorite.  They’re comfortable, have places to plug in things that need charging, and their bathrooms are pretty clean.  All and all, not a bad train experience.  I woke up at about 7:30AM to the beautiful sights of the Austrian countryside.  I never had a mental picture of what Austria might look like before, so I was pleased to see how beautiful it was.

We arrived at the train station perfectly fine, got off the train and set off for the ticket counter.  The man at the desk spoke pretty broken English, but we managed to get two tickets from Vienna to Prague no problem.  We then stopped at a place in the station (just as comfortable, clean and convenient as their trains) to have some Wiener schnitzel and apple strudel and sat down to eat it and relax.  About half way through our schnitzel, as Jon was reading the train schedule, he realized that the train to Prague isn’t leaving from this station, and there isn’t a train to get from the station we were in to the station we needed to be in.  All this realization with only 30 minutes until our train leaves.  Well, some more reading led us to find that they have a metro system, and once we figured out where we needed to go, we got there with about 10 minutes to spare.  Same sort of train that we took to get to Vienna, only this time we didn’t have a cabin seat assignment.  We didn’t see any other sort of seats, so we just picked one and sat down.  Lucky for us, the 5 hour trip into Prague was made much shorter and more enjoyable by two brothers from New Zealand sitting in the cabin with us.  They told us that unless the train people kick us out of our seats to find new ones, we were welcome to stay with them.  We talked the whole way about a number of things, and only at the very end, as we were loading up our bags to get off the train, did we finally actually exchange names.  Funny how those sorts of things happen.

Getting from Prague to our host was fairly easy.  Czech is nothing like anything we’ve read before, so there was no guessing as to what the signs said.  Also, when the last train we took would make its stops, it would do so well before we could read the sign of our destination.  This was a little nerve wracking, since we didn’t really feel like getting off at the wrong stop or missing ours, but we managed okay.  After finding a payphone and calling our host, one of them was there within about 15 minutes or so to pick us up.  Finally.  Only about… 12 hours later than we had originally planned, but I guess it all worked out okay in the end.

Currently, I am sitting in a very comfortable bed in a hotel in Prague.  We’ve stopped here for the evening just after our two week farm stay, and head off to Germany tomorrow.  After all our sightseeing today/tonight, I’ll post again with an update on the time we spent in the Czech Republic.  Let me give you a little preface: great food, great company and real forests.