Strakonice part two, in which I get what I came for
I quickly found a map which I ought to have taken a photo of for later reference. It was a big sign and had everything marked out on it except for a "You are here." So I had to study it and my surroundings for a while to figure out where I was on the map and where the other things were (the bus station I had come from and the castle, mainly). I guess most Czech towns have a Kosmonaut street if they did any expanding back in the Soviet days? But in Strakonice, there's a lot of "Dudacky" (bagpipe) naming action too. Of course, being Czechia, or probably just being Central Europe, there is a Bagpipe beer as well.
(why am I putting in these annoying links to the pictures instead of embedding them politely in the text? Because I don't have convenient access to my graphics editor so as to make the pictures a nice polite size and I don't want to bloat your browser)
So naturally, being that I was desperate to pee and also kind of hungry and needing a break to plan out my next move, I sought out lunch at the first restaurant I saw that wasn't a sports bar. It was in the Dudacky Hotel, of course, which specializes in traditonal Czech dishes including chicken enchiladas. Like a silly I didn't write down the name of my dish and I don't photograph my food, so all I can tell you is that it was a ragu of ham and vegetables served with knedličky. The things to know here is that the ragu is actually a very fine and liquid puree of all those vegetables, and the dumplings are steamed bread. If it is not well done, this "universal brown sauce" is bland, slightly sweet, and vaguely repellent. And the knedličky are very heavy at the best of times. In this case the ragu was very pleasant both in texture and flavor, very rooty and the sweetness was carrot or parsnip sweetness, not added sugar sweetness. The dumplings were made of regular baked bread cut up and molded and steamed into dumpling shape and then sliced as usual, and I think that gave them more flavor too. The fact that there were flecks of marjoram in the dumplings helped a lot too. That is apparently the Czech's favorite herb, by the way.
I figured I would see the castle even if I had apparently missed the parade, so I set out walking in the direction I had memorized. After a bit I noticed there were a lot of other people walking towards the castle too, so my hopes rose and I started following them in a more purposeful way. My hopes were not denied, though we stood around for a long time before a brass band appeared wearing funny hats and eliciting a big cheer from the crowd. The crowd, by the way, at least on the last day, was mostly local: some Germans and obviously some Czechs from out of the area, but mostly locals.
Then there was a long series of costumed groups, mostly children, dancing, singing, and playing instruments including but not restricted to the Czech billy goat bagpipe, which is the bellows kind and has cow horns attached to the end of the chanter and single drone and a billy goat head where the chanter meets the bag. Sometimes it's a real billy goat head, other times it's a realistically carved head, and other times it's pretty stylized. Another prominent instrument was the stand-up bass. Czech folk songs tend to have a certain structure that I'll write about on another occasion when I've had the opportunity to collect some examples and figure out what I want to say about them. But there are two which I run into a lot, one of which might be nearly the same as a popular Russian song (called Jablko, I think) or possibly almost the same as a Macedonian song, or possibly both. I need to pay more attention to all of those songs before I make any pronouncements. The other one I think has words about how, if the river water was less cold, or the sides of the river were closer together, or there was a bridge, the narrator might think of maybe coming and kissing the person being sung to, but as these conditions don't hold, they probably won't. The reason I mention them is that they have similar tunes and they were the first two songs in the parade. Also the Scottish band that showed up later did a medley of "Highland Laddie" (of course) and the apple one.
I find I am reaching saturation before I manage to give a rundown of all the bands. The Slovenian band was after the Czech children, and they were wonderful, and I saw them again later in programming. In the parade their music sounded more Balkan, but what they did on stage was more Hungarian than the Hungarians, costumes, instruments, singing style, dancing style, and all. Of course we know that after a while Bela Bartok declared that to understand Hungarian folk music one must push the boundaries all the way to Morocco and to Central Asia, as well as throughout Europe. In any case the Slovenian band was amazing.
Everybody was, even the wee bands with a small handful of bellows pipes that you could hardly hear. There is a tremendous difference in volume between the bellows pipes and the ones that are filled by blowing with the mouth. So if you love the sound of reed instruments with a drone, and you live in an apartment, consider a bellows pipe like the uilleann pipes or the Czech-German-Slovenian dudacky rather than the Turkish or Balkan gaida, or the Spanish, French or Gaelic pipes.
There was one band I didn't much care for: the Dutch one, which seemed pretentious to me. They were tricked out to look "wild and primitive" and I thought they hadn't put much effort into the music itself.
Most of the bands appeared to have dancers. The two Turkish bands, the Bulgarian and Greek bands, all had immense phalanxes of them, but they mostly marched during the parade and I didn't see them in programming.
The castle, where the programming was, is small but it has something for everybody: a weathered, half-ruinous exterior with a dry moat inhabited by farm animals, an interior which is being renovated with funds from Iceland, Lichenstein and Norway, and lots of tiny galleries of local folk art (for sale) and historical exhibits (naturally including one about bagpipes). There was, of course, also a fair around the castle selling (of course) trdlnik, potato pancakes with sausage, flavored cheeses, "Mexican" food, clay tschotchkes, jewelry, wooden toys (mostly medieval weaponry) and kitchen implements ... Since nobody wanted to deal with my fifty dollar bills I only bought a small bottle of Bagpipe Mead. And caramel-flavored walnuts I haven't been hungry enough to eat.
It took me almost an hour and a half to find the bus station, because I apparently didn't memorize the map well enough, but I set out with enough time to arrive right when the five o'clock bus was leaving, which got me back to the apartment at eight o'clock. Besides the slow slow traffic coming back into Prague, time was taken up by me having to walk the long way around Andel because there was no down escalator from the bus station and the stairs were too long and steep for my tired arthritic legs to handle. No, I don't know why this crucial transportation hub doesn't have handicapped access. If you need more accommodation than I do, you just have to work around it and take some other metro stop or possibly even take a tram or bus to get where you are going. There is a lot of redundancy in the system, but it can take special knowledge to work out alternate routes.
(why am I putting in these annoying links to the pictures instead of embedding them politely in the text? Because I don't have convenient access to my graphics editor so as to make the pictures a nice polite size and I don't want to bloat your browser)
So naturally, being that I was desperate to pee and also kind of hungry and needing a break to plan out my next move, I sought out lunch at the first restaurant I saw that wasn't a sports bar. It was in the Dudacky Hotel, of course, which specializes in traditonal Czech dishes including chicken enchiladas. Like a silly I didn't write down the name of my dish and I don't photograph my food, so all I can tell you is that it was a ragu of ham and vegetables served with knedličky. The things to know here is that the ragu is actually a very fine and liquid puree of all those vegetables, and the dumplings are steamed bread. If it is not well done, this "universal brown sauce" is bland, slightly sweet, and vaguely repellent. And the knedličky are very heavy at the best of times. In this case the ragu was very pleasant both in texture and flavor, very rooty and the sweetness was carrot or parsnip sweetness, not added sugar sweetness. The dumplings were made of regular baked bread cut up and molded and steamed into dumpling shape and then sliced as usual, and I think that gave them more flavor too. The fact that there were flecks of marjoram in the dumplings helped a lot too. That is apparently the Czech's favorite herb, by the way.
I figured I would see the castle even if I had apparently missed the parade, so I set out walking in the direction I had memorized. After a bit I noticed there were a lot of other people walking towards the castle too, so my hopes rose and I started following them in a more purposeful way. My hopes were not denied, though we stood around for a long time before a brass band appeared wearing funny hats and eliciting a big cheer from the crowd. The crowd, by the way, at least on the last day, was mostly local: some Germans and obviously some Czechs from out of the area, but mostly locals.
Then there was a long series of costumed groups, mostly children, dancing, singing, and playing instruments including but not restricted to the Czech billy goat bagpipe, which is the bellows kind and has cow horns attached to the end of the chanter and single drone and a billy goat head where the chanter meets the bag. Sometimes it's a real billy goat head, other times it's a realistically carved head, and other times it's pretty stylized. Another prominent instrument was the stand-up bass. Czech folk songs tend to have a certain structure that I'll write about on another occasion when I've had the opportunity to collect some examples and figure out what I want to say about them. But there are two which I run into a lot, one of which might be nearly the same as a popular Russian song (called Jablko, I think) or possibly almost the same as a Macedonian song, or possibly both. I need to pay more attention to all of those songs before I make any pronouncements. The other one I think has words about how, if the river water was less cold, or the sides of the river were closer together, or there was a bridge, the narrator might think of maybe coming and kissing the person being sung to, but as these conditions don't hold, they probably won't. The reason I mention them is that they have similar tunes and they were the first two songs in the parade. Also the Scottish band that showed up later did a medley of "Highland Laddie" (of course) and the apple one.
I find I am reaching saturation before I manage to give a rundown of all the bands. The Slovenian band was after the Czech children, and they were wonderful, and I saw them again later in programming. In the parade their music sounded more Balkan, but what they did on stage was more Hungarian than the Hungarians, costumes, instruments, singing style, dancing style, and all. Of course we know that after a while Bela Bartok declared that to understand Hungarian folk music one must push the boundaries all the way to Morocco and to Central Asia, as well as throughout Europe. In any case the Slovenian band was amazing.
Everybody was, even the wee bands with a small handful of bellows pipes that you could hardly hear. There is a tremendous difference in volume between the bellows pipes and the ones that are filled by blowing with the mouth. So if you love the sound of reed instruments with a drone, and you live in an apartment, consider a bellows pipe like the uilleann pipes or the Czech-German-Slovenian dudacky rather than the Turkish or Balkan gaida, or the Spanish, French or Gaelic pipes.
There was one band I didn't much care for: the Dutch one, which seemed pretentious to me. They were tricked out to look "wild and primitive" and I thought they hadn't put much effort into the music itself.
Most of the bands appeared to have dancers. The two Turkish bands, the Bulgarian and Greek bands, all had immense phalanxes of them, but they mostly marched during the parade and I didn't see them in programming.
The castle, where the programming was, is small but it has something for everybody: a weathered, half-ruinous exterior with a dry moat inhabited by farm animals, an interior which is being renovated with funds from Iceland, Lichenstein and Norway, and lots of tiny galleries of local folk art (for sale) and historical exhibits (naturally including one about bagpipes). There was, of course, also a fair around the castle selling (of course) trdlnik, potato pancakes with sausage, flavored cheeses, "Mexican" food, clay tschotchkes, jewelry, wooden toys (mostly medieval weaponry) and kitchen implements ... Since nobody wanted to deal with my fifty dollar bills I only bought a small bottle of Bagpipe Mead. And caramel-flavored walnuts I haven't been hungry enough to eat.
It took me almost an hour and a half to find the bus station, because I apparently didn't memorize the map well enough, but I set out with enough time to arrive right when the five o'clock bus was leaving, which got me back to the apartment at eight o'clock. Besides the slow slow traffic coming back into Prague, time was taken up by me having to walk the long way around Andel because there was no down escalator from the bus station and the stairs were too long and steep for my tired arthritic legs to handle. No, I don't know why this crucial transportation hub doesn't have handicapped access. If you need more accommodation than I do, you just have to work around it and take some other metro stop or possibly even take a tram or bus to get where you are going. There is a lot of redundancy in the system, but it can take special knowledge to work out alternate routes.