Palatial Weekend

When Brno weekends roll around, everybody, and we do mean everybody, goes out of town. We joined the throng on Saturday morning and went out to the Valtice-Lednice region last weekend, hopping a fast train to Breclav, where we boarded a little red 1955 Tatra diesel train to the little town of Lednice.

About the area: From 1222 up until 1945, a huge portion of Moravia was owned by the Liechtenstein family (they kept their estates at 99--at 100 they would have had to raise a standing army for the Holy Roman Emperor), several of whom considered themselves quite the artists and gardeners. Over a few hundred years, mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they (okay, their standing army of muddy serfs) built and rebuilt two pretty major chateaux about 10 km apart--one at Valtice and a summer place at Lednice, with many follies, including triumphal arches, hunting lodges, chapels, a fake-ruined castle, an aqueduct, an “inferno” scattered over the landscape.

We started by touring parts of Lednice’s extensive grounds. The Lednice people were really into landscape architecture, and kept the local peasantry busy making and remaking the grounds--dredging lakes, building islands, typical nineteenth-century stuff. They also built our favorite folly, 60 meter high minaret (the largest outside of the Muslim world, go figure).

From the outside, the chateau at Lednice was a conglomeration of a chapel, a huge greenhouse, a neo-gothic palace and a more traditional-looking building that now seemed to house the people who worked there. And it was hopping. The chapel was churning out weddings literally by the hour. Here’s the best one we saw: a wedding party dressed entirely in “period” costumes ranging from medieval wench to Elizabethan guy with full-on ruff, white tights, and black velvet beret to Empire-style gowns.

Like the wedding party, the Liechtensteins weren’t overly concerned with period accuracy, just with looking good. The neo-Gothic interiors were immaculate and filled with beautiful original furniture, armor (both faux and the real Venetian thing), paintings, chandeliers, and wall-coverings (fabric and paper, some of it beautiful hand-painted Chinese paper from their obligatory Orientalist phase). Lednice’s most distinctive feature, though, was the totally gorgeous carved wood that dominated the interiors—a free-standing spiral staircase in one room, incredible cassette ceilings throughout.

The next day we walked on one of the Czech footpaths to Valtice, finding follies along the way. The Czech countryside is woven together by such pathways, each colored coded and carefully blazed. You can buy cool regional maps that show the trails, some more appropriate for bikes, others for hiking. The main point: it's absolutely fun, EVERYBODY seems to use these trails, and it unlocks the mystery of how the Czechs drink so much beer, eat so many sweets, and still manage to look fabulous in their bathing suits.

In contrast to the little village of Lednice, Valtice was an actual town with a huge church and market square all dominated by the classically imposing chateau. Cobbled streets led up to and into the courtyard; it was easy to imagine the nobles driving up in their carriages—and after all, they were doing that until the end of World War II. Nothing like a little collaboration with the Nazis. As a result, things here again were in excellent shape—so good, in fact, that we could even walk on the parquet floors (In a very Czech touch, they did provide us with slippers (the ubiquitous bačkory) that we could slip on over our shoes for the tour.)

Valtice was super-Baroque, full of allegorical ceiling paintings, some great hidden bathrooms and a few pieces of exquisite furniture. Its crowning glory was its chapel, a full-on Baroque extravaganza that made the glories of Lednice’s carved wood seem subtle and understated. We joined the returning throngs (standing room only on the train home from Valtice) of weekended Brnonians, already making plans for the next Moravian excursion.

Ahh...the Moravian Pace of Life

So, as a follow-up to the last post...here are some more shots of our life here in Brno, home of the famous Brno Dragon. We've been discovering the pleasures of life around town; here's our first installment of things to love in the Moravian capital.

Kraví Hora pool: We purchased passes to the pool and have gone three times. Sophie LOVES it, and so do we. The vibe is Euro-mellow, with nary a whistle to be heard. Kids and teens are running and diving and splashing, parents are drinking beers on the terraces, grandparents are doing dignified laps, plavčiky (lifeguards) are hanging out with the babes (you have to fill out a bunch of forms and get them stamped by the foreign police if you need to be rescued, so there's really no need for them to, say, watch the pools. Thus, the lack of whistle-blowing). There is also a gorgeous indoor facility that I plan to use when it cools off. If you go to the Czech version of the webpage: kravihora.brno.cz, and click on galerie, and then click on the picture, you can get a sense for the place. It's incredibly beautiful.


Next on our neighborhood tour is Wilsona Les. (Wilson's forest--after Woodrow) This is the local forest park. There's a cool tennis/sports club, a tiny ski hill, and LOTS of great winding paths that run back and forth on the side of a steep forested hill. Every visit there is magical. Note the tiki forest gods. It’s right down the street from us. Yahoo!


3. Zmrzlina. That would be ice cream. A daily ritual. The kind at the ice cream parlors is similar to gelato, only cheaper (about 80 cents for two very, very good scoops). Sophie likes a mandarin and lemon combo—but then again there's strawberry, and watermelon . . .

4. Pivo. Okay, we knew this was coming. Pivo is beer. We know what it looks like. It's great; it's cheaper than water (or ice cream--you could have a large beer for the price of a cone—and get change back); it's _everywhere_ (like at the pool, outside churches, the train station kiosks, the castles). But just because the Czech lands live up to certain expectations doesn't mean we want to leave itoff of our list. And, by the way, look at the fresh veggies in the picture below--yes, that is fried cheese on Sophie's plate, but Czech food IS more than potatoes and meat.

Next up, another beautiful castle —and—Sophie discovers her Czech roots. But for now, na shledanou!

It's our neighborhood, really!

We'll say more about it later on, but here's just a preview of coming attractions.

The Pool: when we saw this picture on the web we thought it was a fake. A public pool THAT nice?! Yes, and it will only cost us $0.25 a visit. (we went today and Sophie had her first playing interaction with a Czech kid!)

The cute chapel: yup, it could be some crazy quaint village in the Italian Alps, but no, it's here AND there is a pub nearby with beer that's cheaper than water (to be fair, the beer is cheaper than water in every pub; and the folks looked just fine at the pool in their swimsuits: go figure).

The historic vista: that's the view from our kitchen balcony. To get the rainbow you have to pay the lady 4 Koruny.

History is now, and then, and then once again...

The last couple days in Brno have been a lesson in history Czech style. EVERYTHING is changing here, and quickly.

The first vignette in our history lesson was our visit to the "Foreign Police," a mix of Soviet-era bureaucracy and EU-style immigration dynamism. Any foreigners staying in Brno long-term must register with the Foreign Police...who, naturally, don't speak any foreign languages. And unlike the rest of Europe, there are not any signs in any useful foreign languages so...you are on your own to use a bizarre flowchart (all in Czech) to figure out how you will be classified (we were not Vietnamese, nor were we students...and we weren't Ukrainians either) and which line you will need to stand in. But if you are lucky, like we were, you will meet a Romanian guest worker who learned his English from watching John Wayne movies and happens to know that you do NOT need to stand in any of the lines, but instead, that you need to talk to the lady at that desk who will tell you, in a combination of Czech, signs, and a few English words, to complete a form and knock on the door of room eleven. Our Romanian friend, however, would wait for a few more hours. Yet despite these obstacles, Brno is teeming with guest workers and new construction.

The second vignette in the history lesson was our shopping trip at Tesco, one of the "Hypermarts" where you can buy EVERYTHING. For Czechs, Tesco and the Vietnamese-owned stalls that cluster on its flanks represent all that has changed since the days of the "velvet revolution" (i.e., you don't need vouchers or to stand in lines to buy common consumer goods AND they give you a bag with your purchases). Yes, you still have to pay the bathroom attendant 4 koruny and take your toilet paper into the stall with you, but times are a-changing. The faces of this revolution are the gutsy Ukrainian construction workers helping rebuild Brno after years of Soviet neglect and the entrepreneurial Vietnamese fast-food joints that, in a nod to their Czech hosts, serve mayonnaise or ketchup with their noodles (not QUITE as bad as it sounds; we recommend the ketchup).

The third vignette in our history lesson was a visit to Hrad Veveri, a castle built in the 1200s that has passed from medieval overlords to protestant rebels, from Hapsburg noblemen to the Nazi SS, and finally from forestry educators to the national park service. We approached the castle by rail and water, taking a tram out of Brno for 15 minutes and then a sight-seeing boat across a reservoir and up a river. Again, we were struck by how far Brno is off of the typical European tourist map. On a beautiful, sunny day, we were the only non-Czechs among the 100-plus people on the boat.

Hrad Veveri (Veveri Castle) has only been partially restored after a century or so of neglect and abuse. As we walked around we felt like we were getting behind the postcard versions of lovingly, perfectly-restored European castles that we've seen elsewhere. We wandered all over, saw a birds of prey exhibit (Sophie got to hold a tawny owl), climbed on ramparts, and took the tour. (The tour was in Czech, but our guide, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Michelle Williams, gave us an English version of her script so we could follow along). Besides a thorough renovation to the roof, the castle is in pretty rough shape. As we took the tour, starting with the keep, a very deep round dungeon with walls about thirty feet high, and thought about SS officers operating here, it was clear that while the castle had seen its share of good times (English-style parks, hunting parties), it had seen plenty of suffering as well. The tour talked about the unfortunate things that had happened there, but focused more on the tragedies that had beset the building, not the people in it. We learned about the destruction wrought by neglect, the SS, treasure-seekers convinced that silver was hidden in the hollow parts of the walls, and horrible administration in the Soviet era. At the end of our tour handout there was a footnote telling us that Veveri now stands as a monument to the shame of the twentieth century administration of historic places. Oh, and a bunch of people were tortured and killed in there over the centuries, too. Maybe, when you've seen enough tragedies, it's easiest to focus on the most recent--or maybe the most fixable.

Yet somehow, as we slowly rode the boat back across the lake in the afternoon sunshine, it was hard not to feel that things are good in Brno, at least at the moment. A round of zmerzlena (ice cream—in this case a soft ice cream twist of yogurt and black-currant flavors that ranked up there with the best soft ice cream cones ever), a lazy walk back to the tram, and a quick ride back to our neighborhood cemented that feeling.

Meat Garnish

Who wouldn't love a day that starts with eggs and ends with a meat garnish?

Our house is on a hill above Brno. This morning we walked down the west side past the observatory and several acres of public zahradky (garden plots)...the Czechs take their gardening seriously. Each plot has its own "chata"--a little shack that Czechs escape to for hanging out, drinking beer, or just relaxing between bouts of gardening...the pace here is slow...unless you are driving.

Once we got off the hill we walked down a main street, past Betsy's offices at the University, and into the downtown. The contrast between soviet-era run-down functionalism and the older Hapsburg ornate architecture is striking. That contrast seems to prevade everything: On one hand, people are slow and bureaucratic, on the other, friendly and helpful. The downtown is mostly of the older Hapsburg style...I think we were stunned with the beauty.

Mostly, we just poked around trying to figure out how we were going to live and eat in a city without ANY signs in English. But there are signs already that we may survive: we found two restaurants that served vegetarian meals AND also can provide a menu in English. AND Betsy successfully purchased a SIM card for her cell phone..hard enough to do in English...imagine trying that with a bunch of meat-eating ex-commie slavs!

We retreated up the hill to our apartment using the trams. They love their trams...but who wouldn't? They are cheap and quick and....ours (the #4) is red...so there!

For dinner we scooted down the north side of the hill into a much more "real" neighborhood...a little more gritty with smaller shops...but a more accurate picture of life here (this picture is actually closer to our neighborhood). There is a steady renaissance going on here. The beautiful old buildings are slowly getting fixed up. Dinner included FABULOUS beer, extremely friendly-albeit non-English speaking-service, and the aforementioned meat garnish...lovely...yum.

More later.