Last Saturday morning we headed north to Cesky Krumlov in the
Czech Republic. It was like entering frozen fairytale country, with
vestiges of communism and Hitler along the way providing the ogres. We
had watched the weather carefully before opting for the car instead of
the train and saw that the snow in north-central Austria and the
southern Czech Republic had ended at midweek, so we were certain that
the roads would be clear of ice, if not of goblins, gnomes, and trucks
carrying potatoes.
Gray Gateway in the Tangled Wood
We headed northwest through rolling, rural Austria to the border and entered the Czech Republic on a small, 2-lane highway that cut through scrawny pine trees that looked malnourished in the late-morning shadows. Despite the limited, sparse traffic on this rural highway, the border crossing--like the others we have passed when driving into the former Communist bloc--was extensive: a variety of facilities and structures that included 2- and 3-story concrete buildings resembling prisons, and large lots with multiple lanes for cars to be stopped and searched. Abandoned once the republic joined the European Union, this and other former East Bloc border control points we have seen are now weedy and overgrown, ghost towns populated by cold shadows of tediousness and rudeness, suspicion and officiousness. Now one simply drives past them dismissively, and they disappear from the mind like a vague, unpleasant dream at the moment of waking.
Just past the border we came upon three or four brightly colored stores marketing liquor and cigarettes--flowers in the recently planted garden of capitalism--and a short while later we arrived at a service station, where I was able to purchase a Czech vignette, the highway tax sticker, to keep us legally on Czech roads for the next couple of days. (I am happy to report that I did not add another doorway notch to my scalp as a souvenir.) I think of the vignettes as much like the refrigerator magnets that impress random passersby in our kitchen. We no longer get souvenir visa stamps in our passports at these crossings, and luggage stickers became passe many decades ago; however, the assemblage of these highway tax stickers along the edges of our windshield--Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Czech--gives the Prius a special panache, as the scars on my head do for me personally, allowing us to motor past locals everywhere with an air of international insouciance.
When I was reading about traffic laws in the Czech Republic before we left, I found that they have zero tolerance for alcohol and driving: any amount of alcohol, even if it is minuscule, can mean a DUI. I also noticed that the country has one of the highest highway fatality rates in Europe, double that of the UK, in fact. As we continued down the highway, feeling quite safe from drunks, I began to understand the reasons for the fatality rates. Posted speed limits are taken as, at most, whimsical suggestions, and I seemed to be the only driver observing them. Passing on hills and curves shows manly courage, and tailgating reflects effective time management, particularly when it also involves talking on a cell phone. Fortunately, there were few Czech cars on the road as we made our way through a succession of seedy, slightly crumbling small towns, economies as malnourished as the pines along the road. We reached Ceske Budojevice, a middle-size, modern city, and then cut southwest to Cesky Krumlov.
We arrived at our hotel a bit before check-in time and found the doors locked. We waited 20 minutes in the car, during which the temperature must have dropped from about 70 to the high 50s, and I began to think of writing my goodbyes to the kids on the back of an envelope; instead, I got out of the car and rang the doorbell, and we were admitted. Schedule was not the only thing about the hotel that seemed rigid, but that was not all bad. Signs on the door and inside warned that smoking in the facility meant a fine of about $50, and they further stated that rooms were checked daily for evidence of smoking. We got our room, dropped our bags, got out our town map, and headed off on foot, crunching along on the thin-packed snow until, moments later, we had crossed the river and were in the magic world of the old town.
Fantasy Land
Cesky Krumlov sits astride a bend of the Vlatva River, the same river that runs through Prague, and that is not the town's only similarity with the capital. Both have a magic quality, with centuries-old pastel buildings, hilly cobbled streets, quaint and colorful shops and cafes with black iron silhouette signs swinging above their doorways, imposing Gothic churches, and a castle on a hill above the river. Narrow cobblestone lanes wound us around to a large town square, where, we read, witches once were burned and Hitler once harangued a crowd on the occasion his annexing Sudetenland. But there was for us now no trace of anger or evil--rather, an expectation that Jiminy Cricket or Pinocchio or Geppetto would pop out of a side street at any moment. Many of the buildings are, like the lanes, irregularly shaped, with slightly canted white and pastel walls and steeply angled red tile roofs. Large stone bollards, which once protected entryways and corners from iron carriage and cart wheels, are plentiful and bear the scratches and scars of centuries past. With the temperature in the 20s, the humid air felt fresh, not like the miserably desiccating winds of Budapest from a couple of weekends earlier. Small, family-owned hotels appeared about every 50 feet, a testimony to what the tourist traffic must be like during balmier seasons. Much of the time, it was as if we had the town to ourselves: aside from a loosely organized, straggling Chinese tour group, we saw just a few couples and occasionally a family in the cold streets, including one with well-bundled toddlers in rainbow colored hats, bobbling along on the icy cobblestones like little upholstered drunks. Not yet old enough to appreciate the magic of the town, the children were helping to create it.
Our first stop was a huge medieval church, with Gothic spires and arches, and windows that reached from the ground to three stories high. The shops were all local--not a franchise among them. Best were the stores with elaborate, handmade wooden toys--from hunters and woodcutters to merry-go-rounds, from spinning tops to full-length trains, and a menagerie besides. I thought again of Geppetto. We climbed the hill to the castle--closed for the season--and took pictures of the town below. A dusting of snow clung to the steeply sloping roofs, making white and red surfaces that the wind was gradually turning all red. The river twisted along, a dark and dirty green, and I recalled reading how it was heavily polluted during the decades of communism, foamy from a paper mill that, rather than tourism, was then the life of the town.
After descending from the castle grounds and returning to the town square, we stopped in a cafe for beer for me and cappuccino for Linda. Like great puffed onions, we shed our layers--hats, gloves, and coats--and let our fingers and toes warm up. We finished our drinks, reassembled our layers, and, as winter dark settled over the town, we strolled off to check out restaurants, pausing outside them to read their menus, many of which were scrawled in Czech on blackboards in a charming tangle of chalked colors--magic runes that would have been unreadable for us in any language. We settled on a Rick Steves' recommendation: Cinkaska Jizba, a gypsy tavern, and a holdover from the days when the city had a large population of gypsies.
Everything about the tavern looked handcarved. The narrow, pumpkin-colored diningroom was arched, like half a huge old barrel, with plain furniture, framed pencil drawings of faces, and, hanging above and alongside them on the walls, a pair of wooden shoes and a variety of antique farm implements. We sat at a small plank table on sturdy wooden chairs, each of which looked as if it had been made by hand, and, judging from the scratches and worn, patchy surfaces. made many decades ago. Our waiter, a large, swarthy man who looked like Stromboli in Walt Disney's Pinocchio, spoke marginally more English than I spoke Czech. (I know the words for "beer" and "good night.") We resorted to the time-honored practice of pointing to the menu items we wanted, grateful for the printed translations in German and English. Our dinners of pork and turkey were savory and the proportions of good size--all a welcome change from Austrian cuisine. This charming town has its own brewery as well. The dark beer was wonderful--similar to Guinness but not so chewy. Happily sated and fully rehydrated, we made our way back to our well-lighted hotel through dark, deserted streets, and on to our warm, comfortable room.
And Home Again
The next morning we enjoyed a fine breakfast buffet--pastries and cereal, yogurt and fruit, coffee and juice--shunning the usual regional morning fare of cold sliced sausage, cheese, tomatoes, and bread. We started home to Vienna via a southern route, which took us near the former concentration camp of Mauthausen and the industrial city of Linz, where Hitler attended high school. The sun was out, the sky was clean and winter blue, and receding behind us in time and in memory, like our childhoods, were the bright colors and the fantasy cityscape--and the shadows and the ogres of years past. At Melk, where an imposing abbey sits atop a hill by the Danube, we turned off the Autobahn and onto our favorite Austrian highway, Route 3, following it through the beautiful Wachau Valley, and let the Danube lead us home to Grinzing.
Gray Gateway in the Tangled Wood
We headed northwest through rolling, rural Austria to the border and entered the Czech Republic on a small, 2-lane highway that cut through scrawny pine trees that looked malnourished in the late-morning shadows. Despite the limited, sparse traffic on this rural highway, the border crossing--like the others we have passed when driving into the former Communist bloc--was extensive: a variety of facilities and structures that included 2- and 3-story concrete buildings resembling prisons, and large lots with multiple lanes for cars to be stopped and searched. Abandoned once the republic joined the European Union, this and other former East Bloc border control points we have seen are now weedy and overgrown, ghost towns populated by cold shadows of tediousness and rudeness, suspicion and officiousness. Now one simply drives past them dismissively, and they disappear from the mind like a vague, unpleasant dream at the moment of waking.
Just past the border we came upon three or four brightly colored stores marketing liquor and cigarettes--flowers in the recently planted garden of capitalism--and a short while later we arrived at a service station, where I was able to purchase a Czech vignette, the highway tax sticker, to keep us legally on Czech roads for the next couple of days. (I am happy to report that I did not add another doorway notch to my scalp as a souvenir.) I think of the vignettes as much like the refrigerator magnets that impress random passersby in our kitchen. We no longer get souvenir visa stamps in our passports at these crossings, and luggage stickers became passe many decades ago; however, the assemblage of these highway tax stickers along the edges of our windshield--Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Czech--gives the Prius a special panache, as the scars on my head do for me personally, allowing us to motor past locals everywhere with an air of international insouciance.
When I was reading about traffic laws in the Czech Republic before we left, I found that they have zero tolerance for alcohol and driving: any amount of alcohol, even if it is minuscule, can mean a DUI. I also noticed that the country has one of the highest highway fatality rates in Europe, double that of the UK, in fact. As we continued down the highway, feeling quite safe from drunks, I began to understand the reasons for the fatality rates. Posted speed limits are taken as, at most, whimsical suggestions, and I seemed to be the only driver observing them. Passing on hills and curves shows manly courage, and tailgating reflects effective time management, particularly when it also involves talking on a cell phone. Fortunately, there were few Czech cars on the road as we made our way through a succession of seedy, slightly crumbling small towns, economies as malnourished as the pines along the road. We reached Ceske Budojevice, a middle-size, modern city, and then cut southwest to Cesky Krumlov.
We arrived at our hotel a bit before check-in time and found the doors locked. We waited 20 minutes in the car, during which the temperature must have dropped from about 70 to the high 50s, and I began to think of writing my goodbyes to the kids on the back of an envelope; instead, I got out of the car and rang the doorbell, and we were admitted. Schedule was not the only thing about the hotel that seemed rigid, but that was not all bad. Signs on the door and inside warned that smoking in the facility meant a fine of about $50, and they further stated that rooms were checked daily for evidence of smoking. We got our room, dropped our bags, got out our town map, and headed off on foot, crunching along on the thin-packed snow until, moments later, we had crossed the river and were in the magic world of the old town.
Fantasy Land
Cesky Krumlov sits astride a bend of the Vlatva River, the same river that runs through Prague, and that is not the town's only similarity with the capital. Both have a magic quality, with centuries-old pastel buildings, hilly cobbled streets, quaint and colorful shops and cafes with black iron silhouette signs swinging above their doorways, imposing Gothic churches, and a castle on a hill above the river. Narrow cobblestone lanes wound us around to a large town square, where, we read, witches once were burned and Hitler once harangued a crowd on the occasion his annexing Sudetenland. But there was for us now no trace of anger or evil--rather, an expectation that Jiminy Cricket or Pinocchio or Geppetto would pop out of a side street at any moment. Many of the buildings are, like the lanes, irregularly shaped, with slightly canted white and pastel walls and steeply angled red tile roofs. Large stone bollards, which once protected entryways and corners from iron carriage and cart wheels, are plentiful and bear the scratches and scars of centuries past. With the temperature in the 20s, the humid air felt fresh, not like the miserably desiccating winds of Budapest from a couple of weekends earlier. Small, family-owned hotels appeared about every 50 feet, a testimony to what the tourist traffic must be like during balmier seasons. Much of the time, it was as if we had the town to ourselves: aside from a loosely organized, straggling Chinese tour group, we saw just a few couples and occasionally a family in the cold streets, including one with well-bundled toddlers in rainbow colored hats, bobbling along on the icy cobblestones like little upholstered drunks. Not yet old enough to appreciate the magic of the town, the children were helping to create it.
Our first stop was a huge medieval church, with Gothic spires and arches, and windows that reached from the ground to three stories high. The shops were all local--not a franchise among them. Best were the stores with elaborate, handmade wooden toys--from hunters and woodcutters to merry-go-rounds, from spinning tops to full-length trains, and a menagerie besides. I thought again of Geppetto. We climbed the hill to the castle--closed for the season--and took pictures of the town below. A dusting of snow clung to the steeply sloping roofs, making white and red surfaces that the wind was gradually turning all red. The river twisted along, a dark and dirty green, and I recalled reading how it was heavily polluted during the decades of communism, foamy from a paper mill that, rather than tourism, was then the life of the town.
After descending from the castle grounds and returning to the town square, we stopped in a cafe for beer for me and cappuccino for Linda. Like great puffed onions, we shed our layers--hats, gloves, and coats--and let our fingers and toes warm up. We finished our drinks, reassembled our layers, and, as winter dark settled over the town, we strolled off to check out restaurants, pausing outside them to read their menus, many of which were scrawled in Czech on blackboards in a charming tangle of chalked colors--magic runes that would have been unreadable for us in any language. We settled on a Rick Steves' recommendation: Cinkaska Jizba, a gypsy tavern, and a holdover from the days when the city had a large population of gypsies.
Everything about the tavern looked handcarved. The narrow, pumpkin-colored diningroom was arched, like half a huge old barrel, with plain furniture, framed pencil drawings of faces, and, hanging above and alongside them on the walls, a pair of wooden shoes and a variety of antique farm implements. We sat at a small plank table on sturdy wooden chairs, each of which looked as if it had been made by hand, and, judging from the scratches and worn, patchy surfaces. made many decades ago. Our waiter, a large, swarthy man who looked like Stromboli in Walt Disney's Pinocchio, spoke marginally more English than I spoke Czech. (I know the words for "beer" and "good night.") We resorted to the time-honored practice of pointing to the menu items we wanted, grateful for the printed translations in German and English. Our dinners of pork and turkey were savory and the proportions of good size--all a welcome change from Austrian cuisine. This charming town has its own brewery as well. The dark beer was wonderful--similar to Guinness but not so chewy. Happily sated and fully rehydrated, we made our way back to our well-lighted hotel through dark, deserted streets, and on to our warm, comfortable room.
And Home Again
The next morning we enjoyed a fine breakfast buffet--pastries and cereal, yogurt and fruit, coffee and juice--shunning the usual regional morning fare of cold sliced sausage, cheese, tomatoes, and bread. We started home to Vienna via a southern route, which took us near the former concentration camp of Mauthausen and the industrial city of Linz, where Hitler attended high school. The sun was out, the sky was clean and winter blue, and receding behind us in time and in memory, like our childhoods, were the bright colors and the fantasy cityscape--and the shadows and the ogres of years past. At Melk, where an imposing abbey sits atop a hill by the Danube, we turned off the Autobahn and onto our favorite Austrian highway, Route 3, following it through the beautiful Wachau Valley, and let the Danube lead us home to Grinzing.
No comments:
Post a Comment