(Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic)
Cesky Krumlov (chess-key croom-lov) sounds enough like a character from Harry Potter, or at least the slutty sister of a character from Harry Potter—maybe the Bulgarian quidditch player, yes?—that I still giggle a little every time I say it. It's a town in the Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, which meant Boff and I had to leave our Prague hotel at 4.30am for the 5.16am train. We arrived just after 9am due to a 'buses replace trains' incident.
It's a dignified place with a castle as its central feature and more modern outskirts. The castle is the tourist magnet, though, and that's where we headed, down cobblestone streets into the old town. I'm starting to think no pair of shoes I own really deals with cobblestones all that well: the soles keep catching on the edges of the stones. It seems I didn't learn any lessons from visiting Edinburgh.
We take a self-guided look at the castle tower, then a couple of the guide-only castle tours, one that takes us through some of the rooms, which have been set up as they would have been back in the day, and another that shows us the Baroque Theatre, including under the backstage area where stagehands would've changed scenery etc.
The deal is that there have been three main families who have owned the castle, the Rosenbergs, Eggenbergs, then the Schwarzenbergs, and three main types of architecture: Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. The weird part is that despite the wealth of these families, none of them seemed to have very much taste in painting. There's a lot of bad trompe l'oeil (the Castle Tower and the courtyards surrounding it) and a helluva lot of portraits of male and female children who all look like old men.
And they have a moat! With bears in it!
Photo of the day is of a statue just on the bridge above the bear moat. In the background you can see part of the the Castle Tower and its bad tromp l'oeil.
When we returned to Prague we passed through Wenceslas Square so I was compelled to stop and sing the song to the statue of the Good King (except I could only remember two verses of the five, which greatly annoyed Boff who didn't want me to sing to the statue at all. Carol crusher). Of course, now whenever I think of Prague I get a Good King Wenceslas earworm.
(Also, whenever I think of Cesky Krumlov I sing it to the tune of U2's One: "Krumlov, we get to share it..." Just thought you should know.)
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