Prague 2008: Day 6 (27 June)

We left the dorm at 10:30 to head to our weekend trip to Brno, in Moravia (another province in the Czech Republic). We stopped in the town of Tisnov to visit a cloister built in the 13th century. We only arrived at the cloister after an extremely long bus ride, but the whole country is gorgeous and wonderfully green. The cloister seemed attractively simple enough, but the Gothic arch that made the entrance to the church was amazingly intricate. Z led our tour, and he started stopping to seem like some random guy with lots of stories and started seeming more like our personal tour guide, history expert, and authority on architectural periods. Not to mention that he has a certain mother hen-type fondness for each and every one of us.

The name of the hotel in Brno was Hotel Myslivna, and our rooms seemed like palaces compared to the conditions in the dorms. Even the bathroom was nicer than the bathroom in the hotel in London. After some brief confusion where Alicia and I ended up in the room that was supposed to be Jana's (it didn't matter, though, since both rooms had two beds), we progressed to having a misunderstanding about where and when our group was going to meet for dinner. We had dinner at the hotel, ordering off the English menu rather than the Czech one. I ordered, and received, chicken on a salad consisting entirely of bell peppers, tomato, and cucumber. Some of the vegetarian girls ordered fried cheese and got omlettes, which they had to send back because there was ham in them. Apparently the positions of those items on the menu were either really close or they were switched. We got dessert, too, and I ordered something that was simply called "cheese dessert." If you know much of anything about me, you know I couldn't possibly pass up the possibility for cheese in a dessert. It turned out to be what was essentially a cheese mousse with a dressing of forest fruit (tiny, tart berries). The poor waiter, who was overworked and rather flustered from messing up the fried cheese, brought Alicia the wrong ice cream dessert.

We managed to pay for our dinner just in time to hop onto the bus and go into downtown Brno. We had about an hour to wander on our own before going back to the hotel that night. Alicia hung out downstairs for a while, and I enjoyed getting clean in the nice, shiny, clean hotel room bathtub.















A random view from the gas station where we stopped for a snack and potty break. We saw a lot of this gas station on all our weekend trips.




















The outside of the cloister and its gorgeous arch/entrance way.















This was outside of the building, a representation of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.




















Linden Tree, the Czech national tree. It was in full blossom, and it smelled so good.















My dinner at the hotel. The big poofy things are croutons.















My cheese dessert with a forest fruit dressing.




















The plague column in the square in Brno. These things were everywhere!