Central Europe Part II

Saturday: the Punkva caves and Brno

In the morning we headed off to the Punkva caves outside of Brno. Going through the caves was awesome, especially when we came to an outside area at the bottom of a huge ravine – we walked out and this intense church music was playing. It was over the top, but at the same time it was absolutely perfect – the view was incredible and there were even birds chirping. Ironically, it’s apparently a popular place for people to commit suicide.

We also got to go on a boat ride through the caves, which was a little nervewracking because we had to duck quite a few times to avoid hitting our heads on rocks, but still really cool.

After coming back from the Punkva caves, we trekked up to Špilberk Castle in Brno. By that time the castle was pretty much closing so we didn’t see too much except some bells that chime a song on every hour.

Sunday: Lednice, Valtice, and Mikulov

We left Brno Sunday morning and headed off to two towns called Lednice and Valtice. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you which was which at this point. I know we saw a castle or two, and it was at this point that we all realized we never want to see another castle again in our lives. There was also a minaret, which was a big tower that we walked up that had great views. We stopped at one random castle-type thing where we had coffee, and had no idea why, until we found out that it was a castle that once was right on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria. It isn’t anymore, of course, but the stop was worth it because we found a playground!!

The highlight of Sunday – and probably the whole trip – was our wine tasting dinner in Mikulov. It was a private dinner held in this little restaurant/wine cellar owned by some 50-something Czech guy. He didn’t speak English, but he told us about the wine and customs and made jokes and Jiri translated. Dinner was pork and potatoes, and it was delicious, of course, and then it was followed up by potato pancakes, which were also great.

I’m actually not a big fan of wine, but the wine tasting was awesome. We were seated at two big tables, each one with a carafe of white and a carafe of red, and they were refillable. Normally you start off with white, so we had two carafes of white and then moved on to the red. Lucky me was sitting next to Jiri, who is the worst Czech in the universe. He started “feeling“ the wine after ONE GLASS. Also, he told his adorable girlfriend Merka that she’s getting fat. BAD MOVE, JIRI.

After eating we went into the actual wine cellar for the actual wine tasting. I think we tried four whites and four reds, but some of the red ones ended up being gross, in my opinion. The last thing we drank was this hazelnut stuff and it was nasty, I gave my glass to someone else. To get the wine out of the barrels, the restaurant owner would take this big blown glass tube and suck on it and the wine would fill up in this dome at the top of the tube. Overall…awesome.