A quarter of a year in Central Europe [#projectBrno blog post]
Well, in some ways, things are turning out more or less as expected. For instance, three months here have absolutely flown by; I just had to count up how long I'd been here as I couldn't believe it. Other aspects have not -- for instance, the loss of my job. So much for my nascent career as a tech writer -- the next position I've found for myself will be in customer liaison instead, a different new direction. (It was that or go back into Java middleware, but this time, supporting it. Possibly in French.)
I'm adjusting to life here reasonably well. I know where enough local shops are to fend for myself, I'm finding where there are bargains to be had as well as what's expensive. I know that there are many more I've yet to discover, though -- I hear there's a Marks & Spencer somewhere, for instance. Thanks to the generosity of a new friend who was departing the city for pastures new, I now have a fully-equipped kitchen, so being mostly out of work in July has caused me to do more cooking at home and a bit less eating out, with positive impact on the waistline. A land where a beer is about €1 -- under a quid -- has not been kind. I've been swimming more than I have since the Caribbean, but I'd need to do miles every day to work it all off.
Perhaps oddly for a landlocked country, or then again perhaps logically, Brno abounds in good swimming pools. My personal favourite so far is the Aquapark in the green and very hilly suburb of Kohotouvice, which boasts a rooftop pool, a jacuzzi, a big oddly-shaped fun pool with sprays and fountains and a water-roundabout, plus a lane-swimming pool, and a long spiralling waterslide that made your 46-year-old correspondent whoop like a child.
Twice.
There are several others in the city and one in a nearby town, located on a lake, which is apparently even more impressive, but so far, I've been most times to the outdoor pool in Kravi Hora¸ atop a hill to the west of the city which is very close to where I couchsurfed for my first week here. This is separated by a small band of expensive-looking houses from a woodland park, Wilsonův les, which even has its own ski slope -- a folly from a mayor in the Communist era. A footbridge and quite a lot of overgrowth now shrouds the piste, though -- I doubt it's still usable.
The far side of the park overlooks one of Brno's two rivers. Sadly, both dodge around the centre of the town and are canalized into fairly narrow channels with frequent weirs -- the city hides them rather than treating them as amenities. That honour is reserved for The Dam, a reservoir in the suburb of Bystrc to the north of the city. The river was dammed 90-odd years ago, creating a small lake, with low grassy shores and some small beaches at the southern end, close to the town and tram stop. Going upstream to the north, the banks get steeper and densely wooded, until the lake narrows back down to a river again, its mountainous banks home to the castle of Veveři. A riverboat service plies up and down the lake, so after a two-and-a-half hour stiff hike up the western bank, I was delighted to be able to return in comfort and style through the gloaming. And it was covered by my monthly travelcard, too.
The reservoir was the venue for most of Ignis Brunensis, the annual fireworks festival in May. I didn't make it to every display, but I was at the first, last and at least one in between. Huge crowds gather by the lakeshore to watch a series of impressively large half-hour displays over the still waters. Teams from around this and neighbouring countries compete, and while waiting for the first to begin, I sat watching many small bats swooping down from the trees around the lake, hunting insects over the water -- a beautiful counterpoint to the swallows that fill the air above the city in the daytime. Perhaps the plethora of flying insectivores are why I've not been bitten that many times yet. Saying that, the wait would have been more pleasant had my Kindle been one of the models that sports a backlight. Several locals attempted to strike up conversations, but as the possessor of, at that point, a couple of dozen nouns and not a single verb, I was -- and still am -- very lingustically isolated, and it's not pleasant.
During Ignis Brunensis, the lakeside area where the ferry docks -- Přistaviště, and try saying that six times fast -- was thronged with fairground rides, food stalls, temporary bars, a stage with bands and so on. Fairground food is fascinatingly different here. There are hot dogs, but baked into pastry tubes; a twisted sweet pastry confection, baked in a spiral around a fat tube and torn off in bits, that's a bit like a sweet pretzel; terrible, terrible chips; and langoše. One of my local friends, Milan, advised me against these in no uncertain terms, but I wasn't able to resist. They're a flat, fried bread -- a sort of deep-fried pancake -- topped with either sweet or savoury toppings. Since several of the vegetarian options seemed safe for me, on a subsequent visit I went for one with ketchup ("kečup"), garlic ("česnek") and cheese ("sýr"). (I told you I was collecting nouns.)
It was pretty good, actually, except for the faint, disturbing sensation of small blood vessels deep in your chest slowly closing up...
Oh, and there are radler. A German (well, Bavarian) word rather than a Czech one, or perhaps I should say a loanword, as it's firmly assimilated now. "Radler" means "cyclist", and a radler is a beer for someone who's going to cycle home. It's a pre-mixed shandy, basically. They're about the same or slightly cheaper than a beer -- that is to say, 60-75p depending on where you go -- and run to about 2% ABV. They come in a range of flavours: lemon, orange, grapefruit, berry etc., and many of the bigger breweries seem to offer them. On a hot day, an ice-cold radler and a langoš are a pretty good combination.
Other snacks are available in the pubs around the quays -- things like potato croquettes, corn on the cob, fried cheese. It's an odd assortment to a Brit but hey, there is stuff I can eat. I'm growing rather fond of fried cheese now. They have to do something with it -- the breadth of variety of cheeses here is fairly tragic. It's Edam, Camembert (which for some reason is called "Hermelin"), Edam with peppercorns in, Gouda, smoked Edam, Leerdammer, low-fat Edam, Balkan (Feta, basically), extra-low-fat Edam, and peppery Camembert. Oh and very occasionally goat's cheese, and a first for me, goat butter, too. Not tried either yet -- like many a travelling vegetarian, I have had a lot of goat's cheese in my time.
And since the Dam is such a popular resort, the trams back from it run extra-late, which is handy.
It's one of the main amenities of the city. Others that I rather like are Náměsti Svobody -- Freedom Square -- the main plaza, which has a modernist intermittent fountain, a strange 3m tall bullet-shaped clock which nobody can read, and various benches which are pleasant to sprawl on on a hot afternoon. Occasionally, one can eavesdrop on a conversation between your benchmates -- at least, if they speak something I do, which in this case means German.
"Grandma, what's that?" [Small child indicates your humble correspondent, who was wearing cutoffs, a black T-shirt, shades and hiking shoes -- really not all that extreme.]
"That is a man, sweetie."
Reminds me of getting a round of applause when emerging from a Paris Métro station, one very hot summer's day in 1993, wearing a very similar outfit but with combat boots.
Not far from there is Hotel Pegas, which is where I am writing right now. Pegas is not only a hotel, it also has a large beer hall on its ground floor, which also contains a microbrewery, making a range of traditional beers: Ležak Svetly, a Pilsner; Ležak tmavý, a dark dunkel-style lager; Pšeničné pivo, a weißbeer; and Speciál Gold, a formidable 16⁰ 6%ABV strong lager. They're all excellent and they're all under a quid. There are also regular specials -- right now, I'm drinking an English IPA, which is neither English nor in any way, shape or form anything resembling an IPA, but which is very pleasant for all that. It's light brown, cloudy, quite fizzy, has slightly more hops than usual and is served cold. Basically, it's a Czech lager but slightly browner and ever-so-slightly more bitter. This is what passes for IPA here except for one local microbrew, Lucky Bastard, which actually is seriously hoppy (but still a lager) and as such puts off a lot of the locals.
The town is stuffed with churches, but most of them are semi-permanently locked shut. The cathedral is striking, though, perched on Petrov hill above the south-west side of the old town. Its twin spires dominate the skyline of the city for miles, sorry, kilometres around. St Jakub's church is one of the few that is normally open, but by Central European standards, it's quite plain. A feature that I really do like are the many potted trees inside the chapel: there are palms, yews, what might be olives, some two to three metres tall, and except for the palms, in tiny pots. Two-metre-tall trees grow from 25-30cm pots like some bizarre conjuring trick, due, I suppose, to very stable conditions and copious frequent care.
Underneath St Jakub's are Brno's catacombs, which claim to be the second biggest after those of Paris. The church lost its cemetery to the city's growth in the 18th century, and the remains were exhumed and the bones stored in tunnels under the church, to be forgotten until their rediscovery in 2001. There are some 50,000 skeletons down there, piled up to the ceiling in winding passages. Some of these have been cleared, restored, and the bones replaced but now in decorative, ordered patterns -- walls of knees and elbows, interspersed with grinning skulls. Relieving this somewhat are a variety of modern sculptures, but all with a distinctly skeletal theme. There are only a few dozen metres of tunnels open to the public, but it's more dead people's remains than I have seen since Auschwitz, which is not so very far from here -- only about 240km. Moving, striking, a little eerie, but a lot less pain and trauma here -- these were the good burghers of old Brünn, who mostly, one supposes, died in peace.
Brno is not as striking as Prague, it must be admitted, but looking down on the old town from the balconies of the spires of St Peter & St Paul's, the old town is a pretty, red-roofed vista of ancient buildings and churches with Hrad Špilberk -- the city's castle -- perched on another hilltop less than a kilometre away. Outside the old town, the outskirts are a mass of Communist-era blocks of flats, yes -- but not all of them, not unrelieved. The area around Kravi Hora, where I first couchsurfed in the town, is a pleasing mishmash of big private houses in a whole variety of styles, from erratic, crumbling mini-mansions to modestly restrained apartment blocks to sprawling villas. Continue northwards towards the suburb of Bystrc, and there's a whole area where the buildings never rise above one storey -- I don't know why, but it lends a pleasant, village-like feel to the place. Another atypical suburb is the hilly Kammená Kolonie, a former shanty-town just a couple of klicks from where I live in Hybešova. Here there are individual houses (rather than the more common low-rise apartment blocks), surrounded by woodland and with one of the town's rivers far below.
So it's not a sprawl of Soviet-style dormitories as one might expect. It's quite a varied place. I can't wait to get a bicycle over here and do some proper exploring.
I'm adjusting to life here reasonably well. I know where enough local shops are to fend for myself, I'm finding where there are bargains to be had as well as what's expensive. I know that there are many more I've yet to discover, though -- I hear there's a Marks & Spencer somewhere, for instance. Thanks to the generosity of a new friend who was departing the city for pastures new, I now have a fully-equipped kitchen, so being mostly out of work in July has caused me to do more cooking at home and a bit less eating out, with positive impact on the waistline. A land where a beer is about €1 -- under a quid -- has not been kind. I've been swimming more than I have since the Caribbean, but I'd need to do miles every day to work it all off.
Perhaps oddly for a landlocked country, or then again perhaps logically, Brno abounds in good swimming pools. My personal favourite so far is the Aquapark in the green and very hilly suburb of Kohotouvice, which boasts a rooftop pool, a jacuzzi, a big oddly-shaped fun pool with sprays and fountains and a water-roundabout, plus a lane-swimming pool, and a long spiralling waterslide that made your 46-year-old correspondent whoop like a child.
Twice.
There are several others in the city and one in a nearby town, located on a lake, which is apparently even more impressive, but so far, I've been most times to the outdoor pool in Kravi Hora¸ atop a hill to the west of the city which is very close to where I couchsurfed for my first week here. This is separated by a small band of expensive-looking houses from a woodland park, Wilsonův les, which even has its own ski slope -- a folly from a mayor in the Communist era. A footbridge and quite a lot of overgrowth now shrouds the piste, though -- I doubt it's still usable.
The far side of the park overlooks one of Brno's two rivers. Sadly, both dodge around the centre of the town and are canalized into fairly narrow channels with frequent weirs -- the city hides them rather than treating them as amenities. That honour is reserved for The Dam, a reservoir in the suburb of Bystrc to the north of the city. The river was dammed 90-odd years ago, creating a small lake, with low grassy shores and some small beaches at the southern end, close to the town and tram stop. Going upstream to the north, the banks get steeper and densely wooded, until the lake narrows back down to a river again, its mountainous banks home to the castle of Veveři. A riverboat service plies up and down the lake, so after a two-and-a-half hour stiff hike up the western bank, I was delighted to be able to return in comfort and style through the gloaming. And it was covered by my monthly travelcard, too.
The reservoir was the venue for most of Ignis Brunensis, the annual fireworks festival in May. I didn't make it to every display, but I was at the first, last and at least one in between. Huge crowds gather by the lakeshore to watch a series of impressively large half-hour displays over the still waters. Teams from around this and neighbouring countries compete, and while waiting for the first to begin, I sat watching many small bats swooping down from the trees around the lake, hunting insects over the water -- a beautiful counterpoint to the swallows that fill the air above the city in the daytime. Perhaps the plethora of flying insectivores are why I've not been bitten that many times yet. Saying that, the wait would have been more pleasant had my Kindle been one of the models that sports a backlight. Several locals attempted to strike up conversations, but as the possessor of, at that point, a couple of dozen nouns and not a single verb, I was -- and still am -- very lingustically isolated, and it's not pleasant.
During Ignis Brunensis, the lakeside area where the ferry docks -- Přistaviště, and try saying that six times fast -- was thronged with fairground rides, food stalls, temporary bars, a stage with bands and so on. Fairground food is fascinatingly different here. There are hot dogs, but baked into pastry tubes; a twisted sweet pastry confection, baked in a spiral around a fat tube and torn off in bits, that's a bit like a sweet pretzel; terrible, terrible chips; and langoše. One of my local friends, Milan, advised me against these in no uncertain terms, but I wasn't able to resist. They're a flat, fried bread -- a sort of deep-fried pancake -- topped with either sweet or savoury toppings. Since several of the vegetarian options seemed safe for me, on a subsequent visit I went for one with ketchup ("kečup"), garlic ("česnek") and cheese ("sýr"). (I told you I was collecting nouns.)
It was pretty good, actually, except for the faint, disturbing sensation of small blood vessels deep in your chest slowly closing up...
Oh, and there are radler. A German (well, Bavarian) word rather than a Czech one, or perhaps I should say a loanword, as it's firmly assimilated now. "Radler" means "cyclist", and a radler is a beer for someone who's going to cycle home. It's a pre-mixed shandy, basically. They're about the same or slightly cheaper than a beer -- that is to say, 60-75p depending on where you go -- and run to about 2% ABV. They come in a range of flavours: lemon, orange, grapefruit, berry etc., and many of the bigger breweries seem to offer them. On a hot day, an ice-cold radler and a langoš are a pretty good combination.
Other snacks are available in the pubs around the quays -- things like potato croquettes, corn on the cob, fried cheese. It's an odd assortment to a Brit but hey, there is stuff I can eat. I'm growing rather fond of fried cheese now. They have to do something with it -- the breadth of variety of cheeses here is fairly tragic. It's Edam, Camembert (which for some reason is called "Hermelin"), Edam with peppercorns in, Gouda, smoked Edam, Leerdammer, low-fat Edam, Balkan (Feta, basically), extra-low-fat Edam, and peppery Camembert. Oh and very occasionally goat's cheese, and a first for me, goat butter, too. Not tried either yet -- like many a travelling vegetarian, I have had a lot of goat's cheese in my time.
And since the Dam is such a popular resort, the trams back from it run extra-late, which is handy.
It's one of the main amenities of the city. Others that I rather like are Náměsti Svobody -- Freedom Square -- the main plaza, which has a modernist intermittent fountain, a strange 3m tall bullet-shaped clock which nobody can read, and various benches which are pleasant to sprawl on on a hot afternoon. Occasionally, one can eavesdrop on a conversation between your benchmates -- at least, if they speak something I do, which in this case means German.
"Grandma, what's that?" [Small child indicates your humble correspondent, who was wearing cutoffs, a black T-shirt, shades and hiking shoes -- really not all that extreme.]
"That is a man, sweetie."
Reminds me of getting a round of applause when emerging from a Paris Métro station, one very hot summer's day in 1993, wearing a very similar outfit but with combat boots.
Not far from there is Hotel Pegas, which is where I am writing right now. Pegas is not only a hotel, it also has a large beer hall on its ground floor, which also contains a microbrewery, making a range of traditional beers: Ležak Svetly, a Pilsner; Ležak tmavý, a dark dunkel-style lager; Pšeničné pivo, a weißbeer; and Speciál Gold, a formidable 16⁰ 6%ABV strong lager. They're all excellent and they're all under a quid. There are also regular specials -- right now, I'm drinking an English IPA, which is neither English nor in any way, shape or form anything resembling an IPA, but which is very pleasant for all that. It's light brown, cloudy, quite fizzy, has slightly more hops than usual and is served cold. Basically, it's a Czech lager but slightly browner and ever-so-slightly more bitter. This is what passes for IPA here except for one local microbrew, Lucky Bastard, which actually is seriously hoppy (but still a lager) and as such puts off a lot of the locals.
The town is stuffed with churches, but most of them are semi-permanently locked shut. The cathedral is striking, though, perched on Petrov hill above the south-west side of the old town. Its twin spires dominate the skyline of the city for miles, sorry, kilometres around. St Jakub's church is one of the few that is normally open, but by Central European standards, it's quite plain. A feature that I really do like are the many potted trees inside the chapel: there are palms, yews, what might be olives, some two to three metres tall, and except for the palms, in tiny pots. Two-metre-tall trees grow from 25-30cm pots like some bizarre conjuring trick, due, I suppose, to very stable conditions and copious frequent care.
Underneath St Jakub's are Brno's catacombs, which claim to be the second biggest after those of Paris. The church lost its cemetery to the city's growth in the 18th century, and the remains were exhumed and the bones stored in tunnels under the church, to be forgotten until their rediscovery in 2001. There are some 50,000 skeletons down there, piled up to the ceiling in winding passages. Some of these have been cleared, restored, and the bones replaced but now in decorative, ordered patterns -- walls of knees and elbows, interspersed with grinning skulls. Relieving this somewhat are a variety of modern sculptures, but all with a distinctly skeletal theme. There are only a few dozen metres of tunnels open to the public, but it's more dead people's remains than I have seen since Auschwitz, which is not so very far from here -- only about 240km. Moving, striking, a little eerie, but a lot less pain and trauma here -- these were the good burghers of old Brünn, who mostly, one supposes, died in peace.
Brno is not as striking as Prague, it must be admitted, but looking down on the old town from the balconies of the spires of St Peter & St Paul's, the old town is a pretty, red-roofed vista of ancient buildings and churches with Hrad Špilberk -- the city's castle -- perched on another hilltop less than a kilometre away. Outside the old town, the outskirts are a mass of Communist-era blocks of flats, yes -- but not all of them, not unrelieved. The area around Kravi Hora, where I first couchsurfed in the town, is a pleasing mishmash of big private houses in a whole variety of styles, from erratic, crumbling mini-mansions to modestly restrained apartment blocks to sprawling villas. Continue northwards towards the suburb of Bystrc, and there's a whole area where the buildings never rise above one storey -- I don't know why, but it lends a pleasant, village-like feel to the place. Another atypical suburb is the hilly Kammená Kolonie, a former shanty-town just a couple of klicks from where I live in Hybešova. Here there are individual houses (rather than the more common low-rise apartment blocks), surrounded by woodland and with one of the town's rivers far below.
So it's not a sprawl of Soviet-style dormitories as one might expect. It's quite a varied place. I can't wait to get a bicycle over here and do some proper exploring.