telč & its beautiful square

every year in february, excepting the year we had just moved here, we like to take a little february getaway. this is mostly because alex, as an english teacher of primary school aged children, gets a whole week for spring break! as a freelancer, i do not get a complete week unless it’s reeeeally important (berlinale!) but i can try to shift around my lessons in order to do something fun that week.

this week, a sudden cold threatened my weekend plans. i woke up friday unable to speak with a normal human voice and having to cough and blow my nose every three minutes. but i have to tell you, i got dressed and all ready to go for a full day of friday classes until i realized just what a fool i was. how did i expect to have several teaching hours like this? in the states, i would have gone to work, because that’s just what you are expected to do there. (even if you work in food service….. yep.) 

but today, i called in sick. bam. cozy clothes, naps, liters and liters of water, zinc tablets…. it was “operation get well before saturday morning” time, because the next morning, we had a 7:00am bus to catch!
fortunately i miraculously felt a lot better (water and rest, it does the trick) and off to the edge of moravia we went to a beautiful little town called telč. (pronounced, telch)

telč has been on my “czech list” for years now, so i was pretty happy to get there, walk to the center and see the famous zachariáš z hradce square open before me at about 9:00am in the morning, bathed in golden light. blue skies, sun… getting up early for telč on a saturday was well worth it! it ain’t called one of the most beautiful squares in europe for nothing! cool fact: not one of these houses is younger than three hundred years old.

when traveling around czech republic (and much of europe) in the winter time, one must simply expect that most or all sites are closed. telč boasts a castle as well, but the gates were firmly closed, but i was prepared so it didn’t bother us in the least. instead, we passed our time having a breakfast at one of the few open restaurants on the square. walking around the two beautiful ponds laughing and talking, and down every cobblestone street that there was. 

(below, cheeky alex finds himself under a hundreds of years old lavatory attached to the castle)

there was something really lovely about little telč. the way you could see these really old pieces of how life used to be…. a disused moat, mysterious stairs…. i love seeing authentic parts that haven’t been painted and cleaned up like everything else. 

in the early afternoon, we hopped a little train to continue our weekend getaway adventure to the biggest city in the heart of “czech canada”…. (to be continued!)

what’s your favorite square in europe?

ps, more czech UNECO sites this-a-way.

linking up with travel tuesday