The first stop was Telč (pronounced Telsh, I think), still in the Czech Republic. I'm obsessed with Telč. I have a magnet on my fridge from Telč, and I look at it every day and wish I could go back there. It was straight out of my dreams, or a childhood storybook. At the time, the first thing that popped into my head was Duloc (you know, from Shrek), but then I looked up Duloc on Google and it doesn't really look like it. Anyway, the point is that it could be cardboard cutouts from a movie set. Or a gingerbread fairytale village. I have a ton of pictures, so you'll see what I mean.
Telč looks kind of like a normal town from the outside, and we parked in a normal parking lot and walked down the cobblestone, which was normal by then. But then we walked into the square, and everything changed. It looked like this.
Look that that Czech sky. :)
Why, look at that! A residential alleyway! I don't know how the people living here felt about me taking pictures of their houses, but they're probably used to it by now.
In short, I loved Telč. My grandma and I bought bread and cheese, and Czech yogurt (actually, it was probably just normal yogurt, but still) from a cramped little grocery store (and a clerk who didn't speak any English. It was so cool.) Then we ate it in the middle of the village. That's when I realized that I was fulfilling my dream of eating bread and cheese in the middle of Europe, and it made me so happy. After lunch, we looked around the stores and tried to spend the rest of the Czech money we had. I ended up buying the magnet that's on my fridge now, from a shopkeeper who smiled and hummed as he delicately wrapped it up. And then we were back on the road, and it was on to Austria. Here's a last glance at the town for you.
I detailed all of this in my journal on the bus right after we left and didn't write again until the next day, so the exact details of what we did after this are a bit fuzzy. We crossed the border in the early afternoon, and spent a little time in the no man's land of Central Europe. Since things are duty free, there are a lot of weird complexes around there, including one we stopped at with an airplane and a huge model of the Earth outside of it. It was a mall or something, and it was enormous. There were signs for strip clubs and the like posted along the highway. (Their motto was "The American Way." How nice.)
The countryside out the window kept changing drastically as we entered Austria, and it was so much fun to stare outside and look at the other cars and little towns we passed. The other people on the bus, being from Rhode Island, were saying that it looked a little like the more open parts of New Hampshire, but I honestly thought it looked a lot like Oregon. A few weeks ago, I was actually up near McMinnville, and it could have been the same fields.
Here's what it looked like at one moment.
And then, five minutes later:
When we finally reached Vienna, I was a little surprised to find out just how metropolitan it is; a lot more like a city than Prague. There are trolleys, and a lot more cars and tall buildings (still not nearly as tall as the ones we have here, though.) The Danube runs right through the middle, and there's a lot of graffiti on the concrete edges, but it's pretty good graffiti.
We checked into the hotel, which was very nice, but had a weird bathroom structure (the shower was basically out in the open, with only part of a wall as privacy, meaning that if you opened the door, you could see someone in the shower. Dinner that night was in some kind of beer cellar. To get downstairs, you had to go down a billion flights of spiral staircases, through the kitchen and around some corners. We were seated on two different floors, and going to the bathroom was a nightmare, because you would leave through one door, take a few turns and end up exactly where you started out. I didn't take my camera with me, and therefore didn't get any pictures of this interesting place, or the food we had, so you'll have to take my word that it was quite an adventure. (Or you could look up the Chorus of Westerly on Facebook and see if there are any pictures of it there.) There were an accordion player and a violinist traveling throughout the restaurant (meaning that sometimes we would hear them playing above us, sometimes below us, and sometimes through a wall) and since they know how to appeal to American tourists, they played Edelweiss, Do Re Mi and Home On the Range. Everyone sang along, of course, since they're chorus members, and I thought about how I was sitting underground in the middle of Vienna watching Austrians play the songs that made me fall in love with their country in the first place.
That was more or less it for the traveling day. I was amazed to find out that it only takes a couple of hours to get from Prague to Vienna, which is as long as it takes to get from the coast of Oregon to about the middle of the state. If you'll look at the map below, you'll see that Prague is actually in the more northern part of the Czech Republic, not that close to the border. Incredible.
That's it for now. I'll try to update soon with another one of my favorite days on the trip- Vienna!
