The Czech Republic

We're in Copenhagen now, having spent a while in Hamburg. They're nice cities to visit, even if Denmark is horrifically expensive, but I'm struggling to think of anything interesting to say about them, so I'll write about our visit to Czechia.

We stayed in five towns – Ostrava, Brno, Ceske Budejovice, Pilsen and Karlovy Vary. We omitted Prague and Olomouc because we'd been to them before.

Ostrava was quite a surprise, but it wasn't the conventional things most tourists like. The castle is the worst one I have ever visited (and I have visited well over a hundred, many of which were pretty poke themselves), the local churches were completely ordinary and the city museum quite poor.

But the history of the place as a coal mining centre was fascinating. We went and saw the model houses for the Rothschild workers from the 1850s and then the model Soviet Poruba suburb from 100 years later. From the period in between those there were lots of lovely buildings from the wealth the coal brought – including a magnificent town hall that has largely complete interior decorations from the Deco era.

Inside Ostrava's New Town Hall. The whole interior is in original style like this.

The city has struggled mightily since the mines closed, and isn't on most tourist lists, but while not everyone's cup of tea, we enjoyed the place a lot.

Brno (pronounced somewhat like burno) is a much bigger place with an older history, had a decent old town but again that wasn't particularly gripping. We mostly explored the edges of the town, including a nice castle at Veveri after a walk along the town reservoir. Also the Functionalist and Modernist buildings it has scattered about. There was a fascinating exhibition by Alfons Mucha, who was a native of the town, that we were lucky was still going.

From there we went to Ceske Budovice. Its German name is Budweis, and its only real fame arises from the local brewery producing Budweiser (not the US variety, which started as a direct copy, but got much worse). Alison and I are suckers for manufacturing processes, so we toured the plant.

Really we only stayed there because it was cheap and allowed useful day trips. We went to Ceske Krumlov, which is one of the best towns I have seen for retaining its medieval character. It is genuinely lovely, but that does come with dozens of coach loads of tourists, which spoil it somewhat.

Panorama of Ceske Krumlov castle and part of the new town

Once you got out of the old town and away from the hordes it was much nicer. There was a lovely Renaissance garden to walk in and it has a good museum of local history which, typically, had almost no visitors.

The locals take advantage of the extreme meanderings of the river to raft and kayak down, but we didn't have time for that sadly.

We also went to Trebon as a short bus ride from Ceske Budovice, which has a interesting and somewhat different countryside. It was a focused on fish farming in the past – although now largely a centre for people who visit the spa and/or like the local cycle trails. We walked a couple of the routes.

Plzeň, or Pilsen in the German, is the place where pale lager was first brewed. We visited the Pilsner Urquell brewery naturally, although the exact details of the brewing still largely escape me. (One consequence of having spent so long in the Czech area is that we got very used to their nice pilsner beers, and are now struggling with the sweet nature of the beer elsewhere.)

Houses in Pilsen. Need those turrets!

It was a sweet place, and the I enjoyed the houses from around 1900, since it seemed that having an ornamental turret was a sign of taste, but you'd not want to spend too many days there.

Last up was Karlovy Vary. It was famous as Carlsbad, and was a spa town going back centuries and very wealthy. The result is that the entire old town is ridiculously pretty, and very up-market as the hotels and shops compete for the wealthy clientele who seem to like it. Sadly, that also meant it was crazy full, and very expensive.

Originally the visitors were largely Germans and Austrians – it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the town was completely German speaking, until 1945 when Stalin shipped nearly all the ethnic Germans out (Pilsen and Budejovice were mostly German until that point too). Since the fall of the Iron Curtain the Germans are returning, but there are enormous number of Russians. I suspect it is cheaper than Germany but has all the same goods and that the Czechs find Russian easy to learn (apparently quite a lot of the place is now actually owned by Russians). Weirdly, and I don't know why, there were also a large number of Arabs and Israelis.

The mineral waters that made it famous come out at up to 70°C, and taste utterly vile. In the past they used to consume large quantities of the stuff (literally litres a day) but now people mostly sip it and pretend it is doing some good. Given the incredible pink scale it leaves on the fountain, I have my doubts about it, but I can see how it used to kill internal parasites before modern drugs.

 Fountain in town

It was a remarkable place to visit, despite the crowds. There were nice trails in the hills too, carefully labelled so tourists didn't get lost.

We also made a short trip to Locket, which is an old castle town in a bend in the river (the name literally means "elbow") and blessedly free of crowds for such a nice place. From there we walked most of the way back to Karlovy Vary, along a cycle track.

All up we spent over two weeks in the Czech Republic, and that without seeing Prague. It was well worth the time.

Our only real downer was that we didn't think very much of most of the food. We had a couple of nice lunches, but some of the offerings were decidedly average. If we had wanted to spend more there were nice places, but they tended to offer international food, which we could have anywhere.

Iron Hut City

Alison has a penchant for "model" towns. We've seen a few over the years, and when she heard about Eisenhüttenstadt it really had to get added to our itinerary. We couldn't actually stay there, since no AirBnBs seemed to operate, so we visited from Frankfurt an der Oder.

Starting in 1950 the East Germans built a new town, Eisenhüttenstadt, pretty much from scratch (it was not far from an old town, Fürstenberg, but initially the two were entirely separate). It was based around a new steel mill  – hence the name, literally Iron Hut City – and associated works.

The town and the mill grew to be quite sizeable. Then with the fall of the DDR, the jobs were largely gone, as the communist era mills were grossly inefficient. The mill still operates, but at a quarter the original size.  The industrial end of town is pretty grim now.

The town's population has shrunk by nearly half as a result.

One of the old mills still going. Most are abandoned or gone.

Nothing unusual so far – Nova Huty outside Krakow, which we have also been to – went through pretty much exactly the same thing. As did similar towns in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria etc.

Another of our visits was to Sillamäe in Estonia. It was a uranium mine, which went from being a model city to almost entirely abandoned overnight (the dirty way the Soviets mined did leave it just a touch radioactive).

However there are distinct differences with Eisenhüttenstadt, which made it well worth a visit.

Firstly, although even Germans couldn't make Communism work very well, they did a lot better job than anyone else, so the DDR was a lot wealthier than other communist states. Thus while all the model cities started with sweeping plans utopian for "model living" the Germans carried through with it a lot longer.

The inner centres of Novy Huta and Sillamäe were once quite grand, but almost immediately they started to build crappy Soviet-issue concrete apartment blocks when the money ran out. However in Iron Hut City they still had the budget to keep building properly. The newer blocks are actually better than the first one. The attached schools, hospitals and shops were also built as planned, whereas in most other Soviet model cities they either never got built or were thrown up cheaply.

(There were some of the poor quality apartment blocks in Eisenhüttenstadt when they couldn't keep up the pace with the inner city, but the reduction in the size of the town has meant most have been emptied out and pulled down. Most people in the town live in the "model" blocks now.)

Modern Germany is also richer than the countries to the east and south. Which means that they have had the money to restore those inner city blocks. I say "restore", but I suspect that they are actually nicer now.

One of the nicer style blocks. Each "block" is a group of apartments in similar style.

The result is that you can wander around a town that looks like the DDR intended it to look like. The places are all fresh and clean and the grounds between them tidy and with play equipment. It's really quite nice and inviting, assuming you like living in an apartment, of course.

Of course, since although the buildings were well designed and up-to-date for the time, they are now stuck in a time warp. As the town hasn't grown, the hospitals, schools, town hall etc are still big enough, so haven't required modern extensions. (There are new buildings, especially shops, but they are separate from the model DDR town.)

The shops are in matching 50's and 60's styles, which adds to the charm. 

Eisenhüttenstadt has started to realise that it can actually play on what little history it has. There's a nice museum of daily life in the DDR over the decades, and they have a well planned and explained walking route of the town.

Some people take guided tours of the city that show the abandoned steel plants and ruined apartment buildings, but to be honest you can see similar all over Eastern Europe (and indeed Detroit, Glasgow etc). While revel in ruins when the real joy of Eisenhüttenstadt is that you can see a very large model town from the Communist era looking nice? 

Wildlife

Because we are travelling without a car, we tend to spend most of our time in towns. That could get a bit samey, especially as we are travelling quite slowly, so we don't get the rapid variation in the towns themselves that a flying visit gets.

So we take the time in most places to have a decent walk in the countryside. As often as not the local trams and buses run to right on the outskirts of towns so getting out of town isn't an issue.

There's usually marked trails we can find with a bit of research, but identifying which trail is which has been an issue. This has resulted in a few walks taking fairly sizable detours, although without actually getting lost (Google Maps is a life-saver in that regard, because we can always place and orient ourselves).

What has surprised me is how much variation in animal life we have seen, and also what we haven't seen.

Southern Europe was alive with butterflies while we were there, with huge numbers and lots of variety. There's a lot fewer to be seen now, but it may be because spring is their time. We've seen loads of dragonflies, damselflies and similar too – and the fish jumping to catch them.

Deer and hares are everywhere, and we see them out of the trains frequently. There's a lot of wooden structures on stilts in the fields in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia etc that we assume people shoot them from.

In our walks in woods we have seen deer up close when we startled a pair that were resting and a fox who studied us briefly and then went on its way. Nothing particularly surprising there, but one day we were sitting on a fallen tree and a couple of owls flew overhead and landed about 30 metres away. I wasn't expecting to see any of them, given that we only go out in full daylight. They were creepy too, because they made absolutely no noise as they flew over.

We've seen surprisingly few squirrels though, even when walking in oak and beech forests. Perhaps they stay quiet in the heat, but the only time we've seen one not in a town park was when two were having a fight and the noise alerted us to them. We saw squirrels all the time in France, so I was expecting a lot more of them.

Alison is extremely good at spotting dead animals – she watches where she puts her feet far more than I do – and among others she's found a dead snake, a mole and a water vole.

My favourite sighting was a couple of days ago though. We were walking a cycle trail largely through open countryside, when Alison saw something in the distance. I went one side of the small clump of trees and made a lot of noise, and Alison stayed still on the other. Sure enough, a wild boar headed away from me, with two piglets in tow. We knew that there were boar in the woods, of course, I just never expected to see one.

It's not a great photograph – they really weren't much interested in hanging around us. 

But the incredible find was on an amble around Treviso early one evening. It is intersected by rivers, and we were alongside a not particularly inspiring one – I think it may have actually been a diversion to form a moat for the town –  when Alison spotted an otter.

It seems that cleaner rivers and less hunting means that otters are recovering in numbers across Europe, but it was none the less a big surprise to see one inside a sizable town. We now scan every river for otters, but in vain.

All rich countries are the same

Matilda made a point that I write about buildings a lot on this blog. There's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I am really interested in buildings – old and modern, grand and minor – especially as it crosses my interest in history and so that's what I go to see. But also because it's not as easy to write about the countries we are in, especially as we move north.

There's a line in Anna Karenina that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Well, recently I saw someone extend that to "Rich countries are all alike; every poor country is poor in its own way". There's a lot to be said for that.

For the most part the Czech and Slovak lands are just like travelling anywhere in Western Europe. If you are playing GeoGuessr (where you are given a view of some random GoogleMaps street view and you have to guess where you are) then you'll know that inner European cities are strikingly the same. They have many of the same shops, the same clothes, the same cars, etc. The new buildings, whether commercial, residential or industrial are identical.

Somewhere pretty. I'll be impressed if you can tell which country.

It's only when we visit poorer countries, like Jordan and Mexico, that we note substantive differences. And even then, the richer downtown areas aren't that different from each other.

We went to a really nice collection of works by Alfons Mucha yesterday. He was a Czech artist from Brno, which is where we are at the moment, so they're very fond of him here. You'll recognise his work even if you don't recognise his name.

Typical Mucha posters 

But there doesn't seem much point talking about an artist whose work is already recognised across the globe, working in a style that was internationally copied. He did most of his well known work in Paris and the US anyway.

So I tend to be most interested in what I can see around me that I could not experience at home. That does include castles and grandiose Communist palaces. Alison and I have been enjoying the large number of Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings that remain here, but again it's an international style and you can't tell a Hungarian one from a Czech one.

I also like to see the changing geography, both natural and human, but discussions on the different ways countries behave at the beach probably makes architecture look interesting.

Some of the sameness of places is reaching epic proportions. I often like to buy T-shirts from the places I am in, but like to have ones that evoke the place rather than just say "I went to Dubrovnik". I've basically given up now, because T-shirts everywhere are in English. On the streets, regardless of where we have been, it is exceedingly rare to see a shirt with any writing not in English.

Even national symbols are affected by the move. You could buy football shirts in the red and white checks of Croatia all over the place while the world cup was on, but not a single one had the name of the country as Hrvatska – it was all "Croatia".

There are differences remaining, of course, but they are increasingly trivial. The local road "people crossing" signs here tend to look more jaunty, perhaps because both legs are always bent. But regardless of that, they always have hats on! (Since the locals basically dress like anywhere else, hats are no more common here than anywhere else.)

Food is one area where local tastes still resist globalisation, at least a bit. Unfortunately the Czech and Slovak lands really haven't caught up to modern standards for cafe food, and the local dishes we have had have tended to be very disappointing. Badly cooked meat in gravy with dumplings is filling, but not hugely appetising.

The nicer places tend to serve international food, Italian dishes being especially common. The cafe we went to today had a nice roast river trout, which is very local, but the soup was gazpacho and the alternatives on the menu were spaghetti and a sweet potato dish.

It's a nice country Czechia, but it is awfully like Austria (of which it was a part for many centuries, of course, so hardly surprising).