Bree wraps up her junior year and returns from Choate on a late flight. Liya and Evrim pick her up around midnight, then the three drive to McDonalds for McNuggets and fries.
Despite getting home late last night, Bree’s still on East Coast time, so she’s up when Jan comes downstairs. Bree eats some homemade chia pudding that Liya made, but is still hungry. Bree’s happy to discover we have Beecher’s Flagship cheese in the fridge and Triscuits in the pantry. She takes these things into Jan’s office, then sits on the floor of his office as they talk. Jan is puzzled by her morning meal, to which Bree responds: “What? Have you never partaken of Mouse Breakfast before?
Angela and Jan go to the Pike Place Market area for some shopping and lunch. While there they pick up some salmon to grill for dinner – it’s Copper River salmon season.
Jan fires up the charcoal grill, which we’ve now had for something like 20 years since it was first recommended by our friend Robbie. The grill is still usable, but it’s very old at this point and we’ll need to replace it soon. Nevertheless, the salmon comes out great!
After Mojo kills two mice in two days, Bree tries to make his presence easier for animals to detect by adding two more little bells to his collar. Now he jingles even more!
Bree starts a summer class in Physics so that she can take advanced Physics in her senior year. The teacher turns out to be good and it looks like Bree will enjoy the class.
Liya, Evrim, and Jan go for a day hike to the Mt. Pilchuck fire lookout. The weather doesn’t really cooperate: the top half of the mountain is covered in a thick layer of clouds, and it’s a little chilly when the three set out from the trailhead.
Jan’s online map tool said the mountain was clear of snow, but that’s decidedly incorrect — we hit a little snow about halfway up, and 2/3 of the way to the top, there are a large snowfields to cross. We’re passed by a hiker who seems to know what they’re doing, but eventually decide he’s not following the course of the trail. We wisely back up to the last trail marker, find the actual trail, and continue up. There’s a bit of post-holing in the melting snow, and our shoes get completely wet, but we otherwise make it to the summit unscathed.
The lookout is boarded up with storm shutters during the winter, but we happen to arrive when a Forest Service crew is opening up the shutters for the season. We sit inside and have a great view out over the sea of clouds to Mt. Baker and Three Fingers.
The hike down is easier and faster, but the drive home takes longer.
Angela, Bree, Jan, and Liya fly down to the Bay Area for Evan’s graduation from Stanford. This is our second college graduation in a month; Liya’s was just in mid-May.
At SFO we meet up with Angela’s parents, who will attend the graduation as part of a longer trip to California. (They’re in the process of moving from Virginia to the Los Angeles area.)
We pick up Evan from Terra, his senior dorm. He lives in type of double where each person has their own room, but Evan has to pass through his roommate’s room to reach the hall. Evan doesn’t like his roommate, so has developed the habit of entering and exiting his ground floor room through the window.
We have a good Georgian dinner at Bevri in downtown Palo Alto, followed by taiyaki for dessert at Somisomi.
The graduation ceremonies begin with the Baccalaureate service in Frost Amphitheater. Angela and Jan wait in a long line to file in and manage to get a spot in the shade — this morning is going to be a little warm. Bree meanwhile goes off to meet with friends, as do Cheng-nan and E-moon.
The graduating seniors file in very slowly, and it eventually becomes apparent that there aren’t enough seats for them. Evan gets a seat, but some of the seniors behind him end up having to stand at the edges of the front section for the duration of the ceremony. Someone observes that the ceremony organizers could have compared the number of graduates with the number of chairs — it’s too bad Stanford isn’t stronger at STEM topics.
The service is pleasant enough, with a good a cappella and taiko performances. The main speaker, however, presents a long, rambling series of small personal moments. His main point is apparently that small moments matter more than big ceremonies, which is an odd point to make as the main speaker at a big ceremony. Later a woman reads aloud each graduate’s name as they come forward to receive their diploma. She pronounces Evan’s name as “Evan Miksoosky”.
The ceremony concludes just at lunchtime, and Angela and Jan meet up with Evan and Liya. To avoid crowds at all the nearby restaurants, the four of us drive a short distance to eat at Sun of Wolf, a nice Mexican restaurant on California Avenue.
In the evening we all meet up with Angela’s cousin Tom, his wife Aline, and their son Jason, for a Shangai-style banquet at Chef Zhao Kitchen. Jan points out to Tom and Aline that, the last time he saw them was four years ago, when he and Evan had just finished their bike trip from Seattle to Stanford for the start of Evan’s freshman year.
Evan’s good school friend Yayo has invited us all to a party Yayo’s family is hosting across the bay. There are a ton of Yayo’s relatives in the house. Both Evan and Yayo have their proud grandmothers with them, so we get a photo of the four of them.
And a photo of the two families together:
Bree’s good friend, Xyla, lives nearby so comes over with her dad for breakfast at our hotel. Over breakfast Bree and Xyla steeple their hands to show that they are scheming, and present their dads with a proposal to have Xyla come visit us in Seattle later this summer. This proposal is accepted.
Angela takes her parents over the Stanford Stadium early so that they get seats and to allow extra time for Cheng-nan. At 87, he has decent mobility but terrible vision and hearing, so it can take some time to move him from place to place. Angela again ends up managing to get seats in the shade from the morning sun.
Stanford graduation traditionally begins with the Wacky Walk: a procession of all the undergraduates, many of them in silly costumes. The most interesting part of the ceremony is the graduation address by Stanford alumna Katie Ledecky, the competitive swimmer and the most decorated American woman in Olympic history. Being good at swimming doesn’t mean she’ll be good at speaking, and she’s still young (28), so we’re not expecting much — but she delivers a good speech. She describes how, in each meet, she’s always focused on a specific time goal rather than the athletes around her or her past performance.
The main ceremony is followed by a graduation ceremony for the History department in a courtyard near History Corner. Evan graduates with honors. The woman who gives the undergraduate student speech takes care to work in mention of all of her two dozen or so classmates; she mentions a thesis Evan wrote on opium drug policy in the U.S., Mexico, and China.
The family of one of Evan’s friends, Andrew, has invited us and another family to join them for a dinner at Tai Pan in downtown Palo Alto. Evan met Andrew at Choate, along with two other friends who attend the dinner, Senching and Ula.
We help Evan finish packing up, dropping things off, shipping back boxes of books, and then loading a large number of duffel bags into our rental car. We head back to SFO for the flight to Seattle. At SeaTac we are just barely able to fit the five of us and all of Evan’s belongings into Angela’s car for the drive home.
According to some of Liya’s friends, Liya eats food in “cute” way — “like a small animal”. Her friends were particularly charmed one day to notice that she was eating a grape while holding it with both hands.
Czechia trip, Day 0. Today the five of us are leaving for Europe to visit Vienna for a few days and then a week and a half in Czechia. It’s our first family trip in a number of years, and will be the first time visiting Czechia for most of us. Jan spent a week in Prague 35 years ago on a post-college tour; now it’s Evan and Liya who are doing a post-college trip.
In the morning we take care of some last-minute things, including a trip to REI to get a travel backpack for Evan. Afterwards we try out the frybread tacos at the native American cafe, “Off the Rez”, in the Burke Museum on the U.W. campus.
In the late afternoon we head to the airport and board our first flight to Charles de Gaulle. Bree doesn’t want to sit next to a stranger, so Jan swaps seats with her.
Czechia trip, Day 1. We have just enough time at the Charles de Gaulle airport to get a snack before we need to board our flight to Vienna. The airport croissant puts most American bakery croissants to shame, containing just enough flour to hold the butter together.
After landing in Vienna we make our way to train into the city. We transfer to a city subway, but we’re confused about where and how to pay; everyone seems to be walking past the ticket scanners without using them. (Maybe they all have monthly passes?)
We come out of the metro at Stephenplatz, home to a spectacular cathedral. Jan checks his phone for the directions to our hotel, and is pleasantly surprised that we’re already standing in front of it.
We all take a short nap and then go out in search of a quick dinner. Evan’s friend has recommended a sausage stand called Bitzinger. The stand is out of the “Bosna” entree it’s known for; we settle for the standard hot dogs and they’re quite good. Instead of a typical American bun, they spear a small baguette on a spike to create a hole and stuff the condiments and sausage inside. We love this; it keeps everything inside.
Angela, Jan, and Bree are ready to collapse from jet lag, but Evan and Liya have the energy to go for a walk.
Czechia trip, Day 2. We go out in search of tasty baked goods and find them at Öfferl. The bread is great, the jam croissant thing is great, the meusli with yogurt is great. Sadly, Bree is not feeling great; after breakfast she returns to the hotel, where she spends the rest of the day while we go out.
Angela is excited to see the Lipizzaner Stallions, so goes off on her own to see them. Liya, Evan, and Jan go to two small but interesting sites, the first of which is a butterfly house. The greenhouse is lush with plants, and there are butterflies everywhere. We stop to look at a glass case with pupae. One of them starts to twitch, and a few moments later a new butterfly emerges. It looks wet and bedraggled, and crawls into a position where it can let its new wings dry out.
The next stop is a small clock museum. It’s full of interesting clocks, but some that catch our eyes are large paintings that happen to include clock towers somewhere in the picture: the tower’s clock is an actual clock that keeps time. Oddly, one artist decided that an appropriate scene for such a painting is the moment when Charles I is being led off for execution.
We’re not far from Cafe Central, another place Evan’s recommended. There’s a line, but it moves quickly. The cafe is famous as having been frequented by historical figures like Sigmund Freud and Leo Trotsky. If the cafe experience has remained the same for all these years, then Freud and Trotsky must have come for the pleasant ambiance of the beautiful vaulted ceilings and not the mediocre drinks and terrible service. Evan gets the house’s speciality coffee, which includes apricot liqueur. It tastes terrible.
Angela joins the group and we all go to lunch at one of the zillions of cafes with outdoor seating on pedestrian street. After a nap break, we go to the Kunsthistoriches Museum. We pick out a few interesting items from the museum brochure and go in search of them. We start by looking for the “Spandrel” female figures by Gustav Klimt, and it takes us a long time to work out that the paintings are actually murals high up on the wall of the opulent main staircase hall. We also find a Vermeer and some Rembrandts, but by the time we find a gilded “automata” we’re getting tired. Evan lies down on a bench in one hall and falls asleep.
By now it’s quite hot, and we’re all eager to return to the hotel to cool off and take a nap. Before heading to their rooms, Liya and Jan stop at the corner gelateria, which is quite good.
Dinner is at Plachutta Wollzeile, known for its boiled beef entrees. This style of dish was apparently a favorite of Emperor Josef; we’re game to try it. The waiter is a bit of a character: he asks us whether we want noodles in our soup or “pancakes” (shredded crepes). We all say “noodles”, but he shakes his head firmly and says, “No, pancakes.” Um, okay. He asks if we want side dishes, Evan asks for the cucumber salad. “No,” he says, “spinach.” Again we go along with this; presumably he knows what’s best?
We find the boiled beef as unremarkable as we’d expected. What is delicious is the soup the beef was cooked in – it’s easily the best beef broth we’ve ever had.
Back at the hotel, Bree’s feeling a little better although not up to having a full meal. Jan takes her down the block to get a few rolls of takeout sushi cucumber and avocado rolls.
Czechia trip, Day 3. We have breakfast at another great bakery, Joseph Brot. Jan’s particularly happy with the house meusli. We’re jealous of how many good bakeries there are here.
Our destination this morning is Schönbrunn Palace. The palace itself is probably interesting, but for us the main attraction is the hedge maze. We enter the palace grounds through the Orangerie and make our way across the enormous park. It’s broiling hot today so we do our best to take shady paths when we can.
The maze and adjacent labyrinth are as fun as expected. Afterwards we stop at the nearby playground to get drinks from a vending machine. While there, Bree gets up on one of several metal contraptions near a fountain. The contraption proves to be a kind of water pump – which completely soaks Bree’s front. Now that we know how it works, we use the pumps to fill a large basin with water. There’s a large Archimedes screw there as well, which we use to raise the water up to a higher level of the fountain.
Evan’s keen to climb a nearby hill to see the huge “Glorietta” monument that’s said to have a good view. By now Bree’s tired, so she and Angela wait at the bottom while Evan, Liya, and Jan climb up the hill to reach the monument, then climb stairs inside to reach the top. The view is indeed nice.
Back the bottom of the hill, we have lunch at a small cafe, then make our way to the palace. It’s suitably opulent but we’re happy to make our way through fairly quickly. We go back to the hotel.
In the later afternoon, Evan, Liya, and Jan go out again to see the Leopold museum. There’s a big exhibition of Klimt paintings, as well as one about Egon Schiele.
At dinnertime Bree once again elects to stay in the hotel. The rest of us walk to Meierei in the Stadpark (city park). This is quite a nice restaurant but not too busy, so though there are only four of us, they seat us at a long table for six by huge open sliding glass doors looking out at a river.
As we begin to eat, the sweltering weather builds to a dark thunderstorm. The waitstaff hurriedly move the outdoor patrons inside, finishing just as the clouds open and rain comes pouring down. When the rain finally slackens twenty minutes later, Liya points out that the river, which had been mostly dry, is now in flood.
The dishes are all pretty good; a standout is a dish of pork with asparagus. Evan’s feeling tired so goes back to the hotel early, while the rest of us stay for a cheese course. The restaurant has an enormous cheese selection – forty cheeses maybe? We pick out a few and then leave the rest of the selecting to the waiter, who assembles a board with ten different cheeses. One cheese is named “Black Horse” because it “runs away” from you when it melts. One cheese that’s new to us and which we all like is labeled Vorarlberger Alpkäse; we’ll need to look for that again.
We walk back to the hotel in the slight drizzle. Before going back inside, Liya recommends that we take a look inside the cathedral. We’re happy we do – the low lighting and quiet make for a peaceful scene.
Czechia trip, Day 4. Evan, Liya, and Jan go out for breakfast at an outdoor cafe while Angela and Bree stay for the hotel buffer.
Bree’s feeling considerably better today, which is good because we’re leaving Vienna this morning. We take the RegioJet train to Brno, all five of us occupying most of a little compartment.
Brno is Czechia’s second-largest city but after Vienna feels small and more human scale. As we wind through the old town to our hotel we encounter some tourists but also plenty of people that look to be residents.
We drop our bags off at the hotel and then go to a small shop called Ema for chlebiček: open-faced sandwiches. They’re good but messy. Bree’s reluctant to eat the tiny quail eggs atop her sandwich, but eventually tries one: “They taste like eggs.”
We walk out of the city center to the museum of Roma culture. It’s interesting and well executed, but the story of the Roma people is also pretty sad.
We eat dinner at in a large atrium at Atrium restaurant. Bree, still a bit shy of her 18th birthday, successfully orders a cocktail that includes a rim with smoked salt. Angela describes the flavor as “bacon lemonade”.
Czechia trip, Day 5. We have breakfast at a cute place called Cafe Luna. Each silverware bundle is tied up with a brown cord, and Bree gathers and braids these to make a bracelet. She and Liya enjoy their pancakes with jam and yogurt, while Angela and Jan like their “Turkish eggs” with yogurt.
Our first tourist stop is the Brno city hall, home to a paternoster elevator: a very old kind of elevator that has a constantly-moving chain of passenger cars moving up one side and down the other. This is extremely fun to ride, which we do multiple times. Jan: “Now I know what sushi feels like.” Signs at the top and bottom floors tells passengers to get off, but we ignore these so we can experience moving from one side of the paternoster to the other. Swinging through the dark bottom, surrounded by loud clicking sounds, is particularly interesting.
We visit the Museum of Applied Arts, an eclectic mix of fashion, pottery, and knickknacks. The museum’s cafe has a “Robot barista”, and Evan uses the control panel to order a juice. Behind a wall of glass, a robotic arm whirls into action to… press a button on a juice dispenser that dispenses juice into a cup. Huh. The arm moves the cup to a silver tray, then puts the tray in a small window where Evan can reach it. Evan takes the juice, just about the same moment a museum employee walks over to remove the tray from the window. Apparently the robot can’t do that itself.
Next stop is Kočkafé Schrödinger, whose name is full of wordplay: kočka means “cat” + kafé, plus it references Schrödinger’s cat. The cat cafe is indeed full of cats: cats on chairs, cats walking around, cats sleeping in boxes, and a cat on a narrow bridge above us. Surprisingly, the room doesn’t have a strong cat smell. The menu takes the form of an origami cat. There’s also a brochure with a profile of each of the cafe’s cats, who live up to their descriptions: one cat is apparently deaf and is said to meow oddly; this is true. Bree is delighted with all the cats. She takes off the bracelet she made at breakfast and it becomes a compelling cat toy.
We eat at a Czech restaurant for lunch. The Czech menu has a drink labeled “Grog”, which Evan looks up; it means “grog”. Evan orders the grog, which turns out to be alcohol in hot water.
We collect our bags from the hotel and walk back to the Brno train station. Our train to Prague is delayed but eventually shows up.
From the Prague main station it’s about a 15 minute walk to our AirBnB apartment on Sokolská Avenue. An apartment manager takes us up six flights to the top floor. We’d originally booked an apartment closer to the city center but were told the building had issues. The company offered a different apartment slightly further from the center, but in compensation the apartment seems nicer, has a great view from a rooftop deck, and is enormous. There are six bedrooms with something like 14 beds, so everyone gets a room they’re happy with.
At dinnertime Evan elects to stay in the apartment while the rest of us walk to a nice dinner at Portfolio in the old town. We walk back along Wenceslas Square.
Czechia trip, Day 6. For our first breakfast in Prague we make a short walk to Honest Taste, which turns out to have a pleasant shaded garden in the back. Evan’s order of pancakes is tasty but far too big.
The apartment building includes a laundry room with free washers and driers, so we do laundry in the morning. At lunchtime we walk through Wenceslas Square to U Červeného páva (The Red Peacock), which has good Czech dishes. Evan spices his dumplings up with a small bottle of habanero hot sauce he picked up in Vienna and carries everywhere.
As we walk around the touristy old square, we keep seeing older men wearing t-shirts with the “AC/DC” rock band’s logo. Apparently AC/DC is doing a concert in Prague tonight. We see so many of these t-shirts that we create a variation on the Punchbuggy car game: the first person who spots a new person with an AC/DC shirt and says “Punch-C/DC” gets to (lightly) punch a family member on the shoulder. Liya and Bree prove to be very good at this game.
On our way out of the area we swing by a sculpture called “Man Hanging Out”: a sculpture of Sigmund Freud hanging by one arm from a post several stories above the street.
Today’s main event is meeting Jan’s aunt Hela and the family of her son Ivo. We go to the main Prague station, where we’re met by Ivo’s daughter Gabriela. Gabi worked in the States as an au pair for two years, so her English is excellent.
Gabi’s already purchased our train tickets to the town of Řičany. Ivo lives in the country home that’s been in the family since at least the time of Jan’s grandfather. The Miksovsky family used to retreat to the (slightly) cooler country home during the warm summer months, and the house remains in the family to this day.
We walk the 20 minutes or so from the station to the house, where we’re met by Ivo, his wife Romana, and Hela. Hela just turned 92 and is going deaf, but her mind is still sharp. Jan produces one of the Czech phrases he’s learned for the occasion: “Nezměníl ses!” – “You haven’t changed!”
We also meet Ivo’s other daughter Kateřina and her own daughters Ella (7) and Nora (3). The household is rounded out by two dogs – a friendly but somewhat thick-headed black dog named Teddy, and a small older dog – plus a cat we’ll meet later.
We sit in the backyard garden. When asked “Beer or wine?”, we wisely make the correct choice in Czechia: beer. There’s also a fruit cake Romana has made and which everyone likes. Jan shares some humangear products he’s brought from Chris. Kati and Romana’s English is quite good, but Gabi does the lion’s share of the translating between Czech and English.
After a while, Gabi’s boyfriend arrives, and he begins setting up to grill an enormous amount and variety of meat. As he grills, Nora keeps running around the yard, even after it begins to drizzle, singing a song from the movie “Frozen 2”. Both Ella and Gabi like their foldable humangear sporks and keep playing with them; Ella also uses her spork to eat her dinner.
We linger after dinner while waiting for the rain to let up. Finally, a little before Hela’s bedtime at 9:30 we say goodbye to everyone and walk back with Gabi to the station. She says goodbye to us there and we make the trip back to Prague.
Walking through the main Prague station, we see that the AC/DC concert has just let out – there are waves of people wearing AC/DC t-shirts, so we temporarily suspend the game of Punch-C/DC.
Czechia trip, Day 7. We’re grateful for cooler temperatures this morning as we walk to a good breakfast at Coffee Factory. Afterwards we walk to the old town area, stopping in front of city hall to see a large sculpture of Franz Kafka’s head. The head is sliced into chrome slabs that rotate in patterns. We’re fortunate to arrive just as the hourly rotating head show begins.
We continue to the Charles Bridge which beautiful and fun to walk across despite being packed with tourists. There are still many people wearing AC/DC shirts, and Liya and Bree continue to dominate at Punch-C/DC. Evan left his sunglasses back at the apartment so he’s somewhat blinded by the time we make it across the bridge. We duck into a touristy story so he can buy sunglasses. For good measure he buys an umbrella to use as a parasol.
Returning across the bridge, we stop by the Prague central library for a peek at an art installation: a wide, tall circular tower made of books, with mirrors on the ceiling and floor to create an infinite tunnel of books.
We’re hungry by the time we reach the old town square, and happily L’Osteria Palác Kinských serves good Italian food. We walk a short distance to the Czech Cubism Museum in the Black Madonna building where we’ll meet a tour guide who will take us on a walking tour of cubist architecture in Prague – not the most beautiful architectural style, but unique to Prague.
Before the tour we walk through the small museum to look at its displays of angular cubist furniture. It looks uncomfortable. When we stop to sit down for a rest, a docent invites us to sit in a reproduction of an angular cubist chair. It’s uncomfortable.
We still have a little time before we meet our tour guide, so get a quick drink in a cafe. Most of us order cold lemonades, Evan decides to try ordering a “karafa”. This proves to be a large carafe of cold water. We do our best to help him drink it.
Bree isn’t feeling up to the tour, so she and Evan decide to bail on the tour and go back to the apartment. Liya, Angela, and Jan meet our tour guide: a thin blue-haired who talks very quickly. He’s from Houston but has lived in Prague for ten years; he’s an architectural photographer but the tour seems to be a side hustle.
Standing in front of the Black Madonna building, the guide uses the building as an introduction to Czech cubist architecture, pointing out a number of small but interesting architectural finishes and details: angular planes and blocky elements in the building’s facade, repeated geometric shapes in the ironwork, and a distinctly asymmetric placement of the building entrance.
From this building the guide takes us on a long walk around first central Prague, then on a tram ride to the Vyšehrad district further out. At various points he’ll stop to discuss a building, and with these examples to learn from we begin to pick up a sense for the architectural style. The guide is fairly brazen when it comes to entering businesses or private apartment buildings – in one case prevailing upon an exiting resident to re-open an apartment building’s front door for us – so that he can show us interior details. The tour’s interesting but long, so we’re happy to take a tram back to the apartment and rest.
For dinner we make our way to the old town for a meal at Cafe Imperial. The food’s fine, not amazing, but the atmosphere is fun. We all pick out desserts. Jan orders the “Chocolate Bomb Surprise” and wonders what the surprise will be. What if it’s not a good surprise. Bree suggests the surprise might be an unpaid parking ticket.
Czechia trip, Day 8. At breakfast, Evan and Jan are amused to learn that the Czech word for insect is “hmyz”. Many Czech words look indistiguishable from keyboard mashing. Try to guess which of the following are common Czech words and which are just a cat walking on your keyboard:
(answers below)
Today we’re doing a guided tour out of the city. Our main interest is the Muzeum Ostrov lidových krojů, a museum of Czech folk costumes that Bree proposed we visit. It’s hard to reach with transit, we’ve arranged with a tour company to have someone drive us there. As a bonus, on the way back we’ll stop at Kutna Hora, a popular tourist destination with a big cathedral. Happily, the temperature is mild today and we get a break from the ongoing heatwave.
Our driver and guide for the day is Robert, a man from a Danish family but who has spent his life in Prague. He explains that today is the first day of summer school break, so there are many people getting on the road right now to drive to the Croatian coast for vacation. To reach the museum, he’ll have to take a longer route on small roads.
Unfortunately the smaller, twisting roads make Bree a little carsick. When we stop the car for a break, Robert calls ahead to let museum know we’re running late. That’s fine, says the museum director. He’s the one who’s going to be giving us our tour – and he’s also coming from Prague so he’s also running late.
The folk costume museum is fantastic: a really impressive display of gorgeous “Sunday best” and wedding outfits. The museum was started by a woman who collected the first third of the outfits, but once the museum had a home, many other families came forward with wedding dresses and other old outfits that had been mouldering in attics or closets.
The guide starts us in the more Moravian half of the museum, where the outfits are more elaborate and colorful. The guide points out one kind of wedding dress that’s quite rare, as the local tradition held that a woman should be buried in her wedding dress. The museum’s Bohemian half is also interesting, and includes exhibits showing techniques such as bobbin lacing or smocking (sewing to create stretchable patterns).
Bree could spend all day at the museum but after a full hour the tour’s over and it’s lunchtime. The same company that owns the museum owns a number of other businesses, including Restaurant Agnes in the nearby village of Bohdaneč. The restaurant sits on a small pond, and one of their entrees is trout caught from the pond. Both Bree and Jan order it and it’s excellent.
After lunch, Jan flips over his paper placement to see the kids’ activity page on the reverse. There’s a word cross puzzle based mostly on farm animals, so Jan finally finds a use for his mostly useless Duolingo farm vocabulary. Some words are hard and he needs Robert’s help to complete the puzzle.
We take a look at the pond after lunch. The central Moravian highlands are a little cooler than Prague, so it’s pleasant to be outside.
After lunch there’s a short drive to Kutna Hora. The first stop is the “Bone Church” with a large basement ossuary. In addition to the expected piles of human bones, there’s some gruesome artwork: a chandlier with “flowers” made from shoulder blades, and a Schwarzenberg family crest made from human bones and a bird skeleton.
Walking outside in the cemetary afterward, we find a grave for the Miskovsky family, one of the variations on our own family name. It’s not a common name even in Czechia. (But later in the day we’ll pass through a small town whose name is another variation on our name.)
We take a walk through the huge Saint Barbara church that was started in 1388 when the town experienced a silver mining boom. It was planned to be much larger, but a couple centuries later the mines ran dry, and it was only towards the end of the 1800s that they replaced the “temporary” wall at the back with a permanent one.
The small town has a few other sights, including a fake Charles Bridge that copies the one in Prague – although it doesn’t actually cross a river. We poke around in the shops a bit, get some ice cream, and then start the drive back to Prague.
During the communist era, Czechia ended up with a large popultion of immigrants from Vietnam, so the country has plenty of good Vietnamese restaurants. We walk to dinner at one called Nam. After dinner Bree’s up for a second ice cream, so Jan walks with her back to Wenceslas Square while the rest of the family returns to the apartment.
Answer to word quiz: All of the words listed are common Czech words.
Czechia trip, Day 9. We spend the morning in the Vyšehrad district. While walking there, we detour through the campus of Charles University. The chemistry department building is known for a cool display of the periodic table that incorporates the actual elements – but it’s a summer Sunday and the campus is closed. Our walk also takes us past some of the Czech cubist buildings we’d toured a few days ago.
We climb up winding cobbled streets to reach the ancient Vyšehrad fort complex. We stop at the national cemetary inside, and find graves for Karel Čapek (the author whose work introduced the word “robot”) and Zdeněk Miler (creator of cute animated cartoons featuring a mole named Krtek). We also look inside the pretty basilica and take a look from the high viewpoint overlooking the Vltava River.
Today it’s sweltering again, so we slowly descend from the hilltop in the heat in search of something cold to eat. At the bottom of the hill we find a sushi restaurant.
In the afternoon we travel to the northern part of Prague to meet more relatives, this time Jan’s cousin Mirka and her husband Petr. When Jan last saw them in 1990, their daughters Tina and Klara were toddlers. Now they have their own families: Klara comes with her husband Adam and children Arthur and Lea, and Tina’s husband Jan comes to represent her. (Tina’s away on vacation with their two sons.)
We sit down at a shaded table in a beer garden and begin a long session of beer and snacks. Klara, Adam, and Jan all speak English well so the conversation moves along. Bree’s bored after the first hour of this, tired after the second hour, and increasingly grumpt during the third hour. We bid goodbye to our relatives and return to the city center.
Evan goes back to the apartment while the rest of us go to Sia Restaurant for Chinese food. The restaurant has a dramatic interior of 3 open floors across a light well from 3 open kitchens, and the food’s fairly good.
Czechia trip, Day 10. We’re starting a two-night side trip away from Prague this afternoon, but we have time enough in the morning to squeeze in a museum visit. We try the Central Gallery in the old town. The hoped-for Mucha exhibit isn’t there, but there are interesting exhibits about Warhol and Dali. Dali’s best known for his melting clocks, but if the exhibit’s anything to go by, he was much more interested in fantastical elephants and rhinos with spindly legs.
After a quick lunch of Indian food, we catch our train to the town of Děčín, which sits just outside Czech National Park Švýcarsko. We’ll spend two nights there hiking and biking.
As we leave the station in Děčín, Bree realizes that she’s left her purse on the train. Jan runs back with her to the platform, but the train has already left. They go to the ticket office and use Google Translate to explain the situation. The ticket person calls somebody over and they consult with each other. Their conclusion: it’s hopeless.
We walk for 20 minutes in the broiling heat and over the Elbe River to our hotel on the main town square. After resting for a bit, Angela, Liya, and Jan go for a walk around the town and back down to the river.
We eat a dinner of average pizza and pasta at a nearby restaurant, then shop for some hiking snacks at the supermarket.
Back at the hotel, Jan checks with the receptionist about our hiking plan. Sadly, it seems the area we’d intended to hike in had a forest fire last year. Not only will the views be bleaker, there won’t be any trees to provide shade on what’s going to be another very hot day. The receptions suggests a different area that’s a bit harder to get to but should be nicer.