Today’s blog will be a short one, as the cold and rainy weather inspired minimal activity in all of us. The original plan was to raft down the river, the biggest attraction here, but unfortunately this was not possible today. Instead, Julie and I took the opportunity sleep in – however the thin curtain meant that we woke up before 6am and then just kind of lay there for a few hours. We were down stairs for breakfast at 9am and outside with our umbrellas by 9.30am.
The plan today – stay inside. This morning that meant ‘shop hopping’ and my first souvenir purchases on this tour – a scarf and an umbrella. There were also a few other small purchases - the shops here don’t seem to ‘touristy’ as such with some really nice things, including many hand made wooden toys. After our shopping trip we stopped off at a cafe to eat one of the the local snacks – a warm, hollow log of bread covered in cinnamon. It tasted somewhat like cinnamon toast, was very yummy but very big. I couldn’t finish it despite my best efforts.
Next we headed off to buy our tickets to a brewery tour before heading back up to the room for an hour just to chill and get a few things done. Then back to meet a few other people for a tour of the Eggenberg Brewery. This town has quite the history of breweries – there was five at one point and many feuds. Now there is just the one that makes 12 million litres of beer a year (and most of that is drunk locally). Nothing too exciting to say about the tour, except that the brewery itself was rather run down with rust and puddles everywhere – great occupational health and safety standards I’m sure.
The tour guide took us to the brewery restaurant for our ‘free tasting’ – this actually meant a giant glass of beer and I did a very good job of drinking about an eighth of it. We all had garlic soup for lunch, with lovely big chunks of garlic in it, then went our separate ways. Here is probably a good place to note that I am loving travelling with Julie. On all these free days its really nice to have a buddy to walk around with who seems to always want to do exactly the same as me.
It was still raining at this point (of course) but Julie and I soldiered on up to the castle. We were planning to go on the tour of the inside but as it was an hour and a half wait until the next English tour we just strolled around the grounds instead. This included a short look at the castle gardens and a trip into the dungeons to see a very bizarre exhibition of a local artists (fingers, jaws and figures with half animal/half human anatomy). This was actually pretty interesting – mostly because of the dungeon rooms rather than the disturbing art exhibition itself.
Then back to the hotel, arriving at around 3.30pm and having achieved all we wanted from the day. The plan was to perhaps blog a little or pack – instead, I promptly fell asleep for an hour, oops. At 4.30pm we headed downstairs to sit with other people from the tour – all with our iPads and netbooks and iPhones ;) Lots of blogging and photo editing got done by all!
At around 6.30pm we headed out for dinner… without knowing exactly where to go, we relied on Google and headed to the top restaurant on TripAdvisor. The restaurant itself was really quaint – apparently it was part of the old fortifications of the town and has been around since the 13th century. We had a really lovely time chatting but things got a little tense and grumpy when our food took an hour and a half to appear. The food itself was quite amazing – I got pork stuffed with mushrooms, cheese, bacon and onion and a glass of wine for nine Australian dollars. If it hadn’t been for the wait we would have been raving about the place!
Afterwards back to our hotel for dessert and hot chocolate (dumplings with whipped cream and warm blueberry sauce, nom). Cards were mentioned and I brought out my pack. Most people went to bed, except Julie and the Australian couple Sarah and Dan. It was soon discovered that we could all play 500 (or variations thereof) and this made me very excited indeed – people who know me well know my affiliation with this game! We ended the night with a couple of hours of card playing and I couldn’t have thought of anything better (Sarah and I even won).
Today was our last day in this little town, and whilst the weather was very unfortunate, we made the best of it and had a really great time here. Fingers crossed for some sun in our next three days in Prague!
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