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autumn leaves
beautiful fall weekends are here! after last weekend in which we were mostly hanging around budejovice, i very much wished to get out of the city this weekend and enjoy the beautiful foliage this time of year. alex suggested popping over to třeboň for the day to walk around svět lake – it’s such a nice walk, and it occurred to me that i had never been there in the autumn before. in fact, the last time we even walked around the lake was over five years ago! those times that we were scrambling every weekend to see as much as the area as we could, thinking we could be…
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chilled to the bone in třeboň
i have rarely felt as cold in my life as i did today. ohhh, that brutal winter temperature chilled me right to the bone, i’m sure.it seemed like a good idea to go to třeboň for the afternoon to go swimming at one of the famous spas, but when you go back into those freezing temperatures with damp hair and not the proper under(or over) garments, perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all. it was nice, at least, to have a wintry walk through trebon before stopping for chlebíčky (open-face sandwiches) at a café. after returning back to budějovice, i pretty much felt like i might die. just the…
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what month is it?
… because it’s certainly hard to believe that it’s january. after “hibernating” the past two weekends, we had a delightful saturday wandering leisurely through trebon: around the ponds, through the historical city center, & to a fancy little fish restaurant called šupina a šupinka where we feasted on carp fries and fish soup. i was in the mood for a true “sobo meal”, and i know a lot of czechs make fried carp for the holidays (often in the form of a rižek, or schnitzel) but some families do the carp “chips”. and hey hey, those were really delicious! i certainly didn’t fancy myself a carp lover, but anything šupina prepares…
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třeboň + april weekends
how odd it was to go from a full day of snow to sunny and 18°C in one week! from winter coat to bare legs and sandals. but that’s april for you. (shrug) in case you haven’t yet guessed, we had to postpone our lovely little cabin trip ‘til august… ‘cause when the proprietor contacts you the day before to tell you “it’s like winter here!”, you listen. (we just took off for prague instead, which i’ll post about on tuesday) so with the forecast looking wonderful this weekend, we spent the afternoon in třeboň, only about a half-hour away. třeboň is one of my sobo (south bohemia) happy places. i love to…
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tre-bon! & a witchy holiday
on tuesday, alex and i were invited to celebrate witch’s night with a couple of our students and their families. i don’t think anybody really knows what kind of holiday this is, and almost no one can describe how it came to be like it is. but i do know that it is primarily celebrated in small villages and in the early evening, most of the men in the village help to erect this giant may pole called “maika”. here it is at dusk…. then when the maika is erected, the children burn witch effigies in the bonfire and the men sit around the fire near the maika drinking beer and are…
