It's really like two cities on either side of the river. The nazdravi is on the west bank but the main square, Masarykovo namesti, is on the east. Here is where I booked a room in another cheapo hotel with the bathroom down the hall. Great food though, as usual.
This is the Sudetenland. Though most Germans were expelled as part of the mass re-aligment of ethnic populations following WWII, up here the architecture still retains a German feel. While English is widely spoken in places like Prague, Plzen, & Kutna Hora, when I had to rely on it here, people would look concerned and ask, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" so, clearly, there remains an undercurrent of German culture here.
After settling in I went for a walk and wandered up the Dlouha jizda ("long ride" or something like that). This is a street ascending a long walled-in corridor to the top of a hill where the Castle stands guard over the Labe. (Sometimes it is refered to here as a "chateau")
From half way up, I go through a door to a terrace and look down. That body of water with a park around it is called Zamecky rybnik.
That word, zamecky, is another term for hrad, or Castle.
A resident of the castle lawns. I did everything I could to get him to spread his 'eyes' but this bird was not as cooperative or polite as the Vrana I met the other day!
Masarykovo namesti, seen from up here. Note the hilly terrain here in the North.
Entrance to the "Chateau".
It was late afternoon and I walked through a huge and almost deserted courtyard. Until 1991 Russian troops were stationed here. During WWII, it was the Germans.
This scene is the western edge and what appeared to be one of the main entrances.
When I got to the window to the right of the locked door I looked in and saw a small tour just descending the stairs and the door opened.
Hannah had just finished the last tour of the day but I persuaded her to pose with the very large keys.
Walking back. To the left of the descent of that walled road, a terrace overlooking the town holds a nice rose garden where I enjoyed some quiet time writing.
At the east end of the garden was this prominent viewing platform, complete with grandiose statuary.
Left: Looking back at the Rose Garden
and the Chateau.
Right: Looking east toward the church of the Exaltation of the Cross.
Here you get a feel for the walled-in Dlouha jizda street.
Below: Walking back down it.
At the end was another little beer garden/restaurant where I drank a Staropramen and listened to various tables talking. Some of them had come by bicycle and seemed to enjoy dressing the part.
That night I had a good dinner downstairs from Hotel Posta, where I stayed. Afterwards I sat on a table late into the night on Masarykovo namesti. A gathering of people aged late 20s through 50s were talking and I gradually came into the conversation. It was all in English. Nobody aside from me was American or British. Most were travelers from central and eastern Europe. One guy was Ukranian. We talked about travel, beer and bars, and the Don Bas.
Last Morning in Czech Republic:
Waiting for the bus to the nazdravi on Masarykovo namesti.
Hotel Posta is the one with the ad on it. The more expensive hotel is the pale yellow one.
School kids going somewhere.
Looking North from the square.
Looking South where the bus would take me.
The blue one is called the Shark. The red one is a local, "regio" drahy (train). In a few minutes mine came, it was green, sleek, and a Deutsch-bahn train. The frontier is only 10 km or so from here.
Decin borders a national park of sandstone cliffs, ski areas, hiking trails and other things I'd like to see one day. They call it "The Bohemian Switzerland". On the other side of the border the Germans call it "The Saxon Switzerland". I think it's also a national park.
Pretty soon I was in Germany. Both are Schengen countries so there isn't so much as an announcement. The down side is that I didn't get any neat passport stamps! Gradually, everyone around me was speaking Deutsch.
I changed trains in Dresden. What a clean and modern-looking city. (I wonder why...)
I shared a seat with a 40 year old man chaperoning at least 20 teenaged kids on some kind of school trip. I was the only person looking at a map or out the window. Everyone else spent the entire time to Leipzig on his/her mobile device. The 40 year old was the biggest kid, enthusiastically showing something or other on his device to one 13 year old after another. Didn't have a word for me, even when I asked him simple to understand questions.
The Liepzig Hauftbahnhof is another gigantic shopping mall. This was in the former GDR. I grew to adulthood thinking I'd never see it. Now it looks like suburban Illinois.
I told a German friend in Oregon I'd like to stop in Weimar, a city of various historical connections for Germans. Goethe, Schiller, the interwar republic, ... Birkenau. The train slowed to about 60 miles per hour as we swept through the station en route to Erfurt.Twenty-eight years ago I stood at the edge of the Grenze, near Bad Hersfeld. I hiked to a sign deep in the wood that said "achtung!" and looked out across the 100 meter no-man's land cleared with bulldozers through the woods. I thumbed my nose at a guard tower across a high barbed wire fence were somebody was looking at me through binoculars.
It's no longer a grenze and you have to study a map hard to find it. The train passed very near, at 160km/hr.
Arriving in Frankfurt there were virtually no hotel rooms available and I had to pay $125 for one night in a Hostel! But I had a private room with a balcony and this was the view.
Looking west is the Hauptbahnhof itself, very close by.
Looking east down Keizerstrasse is one of the many Frankfurt bank high rises. I spent the evening walking around a very busy street scene and wound up eating pizza from a Turkish place and talking to a Brit and a Swede who told me I was a strange type of American.
Then I headed for a quick look around downtown Frankurt on the tram before heading out to the airport.
Right: Paulskirche.
Below: Roemerplatz.
Back at the Hauptbahnhof I found the U-bahn to take me to the airport. An African American guy from Virginia traveling around Europe took my pic in front of the impressive transit map. We hung out all the way to the Lufthansa terminal together and it was good to talk to a friendly American before trying to reenter my own country. Once on the ground in the USA, we had to run a gauntlet of rude and angry TSA workers at Dulles who made us pass through security yet again where we even had to take off some of our clothes.
At Dulles I switched to a plane to Portland, and so 13 hours on two planes and I was home again.
It takes time to digest a good trip. It's hard to let it go.
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