Czech Excursion

This weekend we went on an excursion around the Czech Republic. We visited a couple of castles, a brewery, and I even had a near-death experience.... sort of. We left Prague on Friday morning and visited our first castle before lunch time. The views were amazing and I was really over-whelmed to be at a castle for the first time ever. On Friday we also stopped at Pilsen Brewery, which is a very famous beer in The Czech Republic. I had never been to a brewery before but it really cool to see how much technology is used.

We spent the night in a small town called Cesky Krumlov, and it was by far my favorite town. This place was so charming and had lots of activities available. We toured the Cesky Krumlov Castle in the morning after a great breakfast at the hotel. This castle was breath-taking, inside and out. It was decorated like a typical Renaissance castle with all the bells and whistles. The most notable features were the golden carriage in a "living room," the velvet covered party room and the massive banquet hall with creative fresco's. It was beautiful. I almost cried as I thought of all the times I pretended to be a princess in a Disney-like castle. It felt like I fulfilled one of my childhood dreams...I just needed my Prince.

Later in the afternoon we went to a photo gallery and I saw what photographers used to make photos in the old days. Let me just say, it's gotten a lot easier. Some of those machines looked like torture instruments, not photo equipment. I learned a lot about photography and gained an appreciation for those who did it for a living.


The rest of the afternoon was spent on RAFTING!! There is a river that goes right thought the town and we had to do it! This is where my near-death-experience comes in. There were three areas that had rapids and when we reached the third, we didn't know which way to go. We had two options, right or left, and up till then we were supposed to stay to the left. So we were aiming for the left, but when we were five feet from the rapids, this guy comes from the side wall and says to go right because we were headed for a drop. We started panicking and somehow we ended up missing the drop and made it in the rapids. As soon as we looked back we could see the 10 ft. drop we barley averted! Now, I can't really swim and I wasn't wearing a life jacket. If I had not hit my head against the walls, I probably would have drown.


Other than that small 'setback', rafting was really fun.

We spent Saturday night in a new town called Ceske Budejovice and toured the town early the next morning. I wasn't really impressed by this place, it didn't have anything that I deemed unique. However, it would be hard to top Ceske Krumlov no matter where we went. We left after lunch and made another stop at Jindrichuv Hradec, which had another castle! We kinda just hung out on the castle grounds and took pictures. We decided not to tour the place, I think everyone we just exhausted from all the traveling. Therefore, we finally headed back to good-old-Prague. It was weird to consider home as being Prague.

So I think I can take The Czech Republic off my list of Places to See. We saw at least one-forth of it in one weekend but it was worth the trip. I got 'home' and went straight to bed.