The pain, the aching pain!

The bike tour was fun, all right, but painful! I didn't realise the effect of my tour in Vienna until I got on the bicycle today; this one was much more comfortable, and a much better bicycle, but it still hurt. I'm sure A-L remembers our bike ride in Antigua, over the cobblestones -- this was much the same, only with better suspension.

It was a nice tour, taking us to all the interesting historical sites around the old city centre. We also stopped at a typical czech beer parlour/restaurant, and just to see if beer was as gross as I remembered it, and it was. Not the taste of it, just the after-taste. Bleargh. At least it didn't cost me too much, beer here is very cheap.

I had a traditional czech supper: beef smothered in cream sauce, with cranberry sauce and czech dumplings. Yum! Very tasty. And satisfying, especially after three hours of hard city riding. Afterwards, I was too tired to go out again and pub-crawl, so I returned to the hostel and spent the evening updating my personal journal, since I didn't get a chance to last night, and I know that if I fall too far behind I'll never catch up.

Tomorrow, I'm off to Cesky Krumlov. I've heard so many people rave about it that I can't not go. It means cutting a day from my stay in Germany, but... I have the visa to be here, and the rail pass, so I might as well!

I've been trying to connect to MSN the whole time I've been writing this update, but it doesn't seem to want to work, unfortunately.

I keep forgetting to say that last Thursday marked the official halfway point of my journey, as well as the most easterly point (Vienna). From then on, it's back west. Except for tomorrow, that is, I have to backtrack a little to get to Cesky Krumlov. But only an hour or so.

Czechy czechy czechy!

Ok, for some reason the "full options" update won't work. Blah.

I'm in Cesky (pronounced Cheskyi) Krumlov, a UNESCO World Heritage site, apparently, almost directly south of Prague, near the Austrian border (find Cesky Budejovice on the map, it's just south of that. It's a gorgeous little medieval town, with little winding streets and old houses and a castle overlooking the whole thing. The hostel I'm staying in is in an old house and has uneven stairs all over the place and a sloping floor on street level.

If I could only ever visit one place in Europe again, I think this would have to be it. Everything I've heard about this place has been positive, and I have to agree. The town is not so big, but the atmosphere is amazing. Shops and services are all in ancient houses, like the bookstore I walked into that had lovely old wooden floors that smelled so good. You can rent rafts or little boats to float down the Vltava, have a drink in one of the many restaurants and pubs, or just walk around town and relax.

Last night, I went to the coolest restaurant ever with a bunch of crazy Aussies who invited me along not five minutes after I'd dropped my things beside my bed. The place looks like a wine cellar, with low domed ceilings and little alcoves along the walls. There's an open fire for cooking, and lighting is provided by candles and the open front door. The tables are like picnic tables, made of big, smoothed wood, and the waiters are dressed in peasant clothing. They make a delicious garlic soup served in a round bread, and meat skewers and half chickens and the likes.

The crowning glory of this place, however, is the wine. It's on tap, so you can get it by the pitcher or the glass, and when they mean glass, they mean a big ceramic cup filled to the brim. So you're paying 25 koruny for this huge amount of good, cool white wine, which amounts to paying not even 75 cents for a usual restaurant-size glass of wine. Marvelous! I was feeling tipsy after only two of those glasses, so I retired to the hostel with one of the other girls, who didn't feel up to pub-crawling either, and we indulged in drunken conversation until the others came stumbling in at about one in the morning.

One thing that was worrying me for the past couple of days is that I've almost filled my little journal. At the moment, I think I have seven pages left. I was trying to find a general store or something like that to buy another notebook, but the thing is that here, you don't have convenience stores. You get food in one store, shampoo and soap in another, clothes in another, and souvenirs and postcards in another. I managed to find a paper store, so I'll be stopping in there on my way to the post office, later on; I still haven't mailed my post cards from Prague, and I bought more here so I'll have those to mail as well.

In other news, when I had my laundry done in Prague, I included my big blue hoody, which turned my towel a pretty shade of sickly grey-green and dyed a pair of my panties, faded from too many washes, back to their original colour. The wash also shrunk the hoody, so now it actually fits me properly and I don't have to roll the sleeves.

The pillows in the place are gloriously huge and fluffy and the beds are comfortable.

This place is awesome.