‘dem bones, ‘dem bones, ‘dem dry bones

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Keeping on top of this blogging stuff is hard. Other than for sleeping, we just haven’t spent a lot of time in the hotel rooms Laurel so painstakingly researched. Today, however, has been a departure. Up after 7:30 and then down to breakfast we then spent a few hours doing admin/booking/computer stuff in the room. I did acquire a bottle of Czech sparkling wine from hotel restaurant—we’re not total savages.

On Saturday we hopped on the train to Kutná Hora, about an hour from Praha (Prague to the Yanks). The big tourist draws in Kutná Hora are the silver mines and the ossuary. We skipped the mines, but did take in the ossuary. To me, this collection of artwork built from skeletal remains, while quite fantastic, is more of an oddity than anything else. On the other hand, the town of Kutná Hora is a sort of mini-Prague and probably rivals it for inherent beauty and number and magnificence of its cathedrals.

For the evening, we returned to Praha and went in search of U zlatého tygra (Golden Tiger). This pub was once the favorite watering hole of Václav Havel and one of his mentors, writer Bohumil Hrabal. Particularly smoky, this is a one-stop education in Czech pub culture. Pilsner Urquell is the house brew. Havel and former U.S. president Bill Clinton joined Hrabal for a traditional Czech pub evening here during Clinton’s visit in 1994. We joined four German gents at a table directly below a photo of the aforementioned dignitaries and quickly noticed ‘tab’, a small slip of paper used by the waiters in these pubs to keep track of your purchase had somewhere over fifty dashes on it. The Germans explained their numbers had been larger earlier in the evening, but that’s still a lot of pivo. We bailed out at 4 marks, they were approaching sixty.

[imagebrowser id=6]

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.