May 8, Saturday Again departure. We left our attic room with the nice view of the Market Place and the Town Hall. It was a foggy morning, later rainy. The best day for rain at this trip as so much time should be in the bus. The Bohemian landscape is very nice in a veil of haze. The giant fields with yellow rape and green corn dominated the sights. We passed more carp ponds and there were swans and other swimmers, the towns often were dominated by a castle and in the surroundings there were the boring flat houses from the fifties and sexties.
The first goal this day was Pilsen (Plzen). There we saw how they make real Pilsen Beer, we could taste the stored beer and the fresh beer. The latter tasted nice, reminding me of the "Christmas Ale" my mother brewed.
Lunch at the Brewery - menu
Minestrone soup, Goulash with Wiener and Bohemian Dumplings (Knödel) and a mysterious bun cake with the coffee.
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Our bus took us farther up to Marienbad (Mariánské Láznê) and the rain was pouring down. In the colonnades there were a frightful crowd of people and some horrid loudspeakers which cracked. I got such a heart palpitation that I could not stay there. For that reason I was not at all able to enjoy the beautiful buildings. We walked down to the main street and saw a Swedish flag at a coffee house - there we had our afternoon coffee with chocolate cake and a bottle of the local mineral water, Aqua Maria. |  |
I felt it good to leave Marienbad and seat down in the bus again. Jirí drove over a high plateau with small farms and then down into a valley walled with steep slopes clad with conifers. That valley I felt as one of the most beautiful sceneries of nature of the whole tour. At the bottom of the valley floated a stream, the Teplá, which gradually grow bigger and at Karlsbad slowly run out into the Ohre (Ohrê).
Karlsbad (Karlovy-Vary) is beautifully situated in this deep valley between the steel sides of the hills. In the town centre many nice house fronts. We installed us in our new hotel Central, a neat hotel with nice beds and and a comfortable bath room. The evening was free of organized activities. We had a chicken salad in a pizzeria joining a pair of friends. In this place there were local musicians playing, mostly Greek music, and some of the other male guests danced to the music. Things like that we are not used to from our country.
May 9
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