More of the Czech Republic..and Austria :)

Blog:

Wednesday evening Mike invited some friends over and we had a fire, on which we cooked sausages (you cut the ends so they 'flower' when they cook), toast which you then rub with garlic (reccommended!), and then potatoes cooked in the embers. I cooked some mushrooms and onion so it was sort of a czech-kiwi bbq-fire. The guests were a couple of guys who each brought their kids, we ended up playing badminton and soccer, and then Mike pulled out his euphonium..I had a go too. Apparently not many women play brass in the czech republic.

Thursday we went to Austria! We stopped by one of the guy's houses first though because Mike's house has...little in the way of a bathroom. Ie no shower. So it was nice to feel clean again! That particular house is awesome...they have several clarinets (he plays-very well, actually), a viola da gamba, a reed organ/harmonium thingy (that was fun actually), and a double bass!! And a piano. And SEVEN cats, four of them kittens. HEAVEN!!

On our way to Austria we drove past the Budweiser brewery. I don't remember the name of the town but it was similar to Budweiserville so I'll call it that. We stopped at the main square and had a look round, also visited a music shop where Mike bought an old flugel-type horn thingy for about NZ$50. It's really cool.

Then it was over the border. That was the first time I've crossed a border by land.. in NZ you can't drive across any borders, obviously, and here in Europe I've always flown before. I was disappointed actually. There was no passport control at all, we just drove through. The Austrian countryside seemed a bit more hilly than the Czech but maybe that was just me looking for any kind of difference. So we drove through to Kremsmunster, where Mike's friend Rudolph lives, and we had a couple of hours to spare so we went to a musical instrument museum. I was a bit blase about this but it was SO AWESOME!! The first bit was a huge room FULL of brass instruments. Sigh. There was some really interesting stuff there, actually, some of them looked like mutants. You know, "I'll just grow an extra valve here, that'd look cool", or "I know! I need another bell!"
Then there was an exhibition on Schubert, which I couldn't read because it was all in German, and after that there were TWO rooms chock-a-block with Pianos, some from as early as 1812 and a good number of them YOU ARE ALLOWED TO PLAY!! I played one from America from 1899 (even the strings were from that time), and one from Vienna from 1820 or thereabouts I think..I also got to play some of the normally unplayable ones because the lady who was on reception was kind enough to give us a brief tour. I also think she was a little bored. But I was buzzing when we left.

Rudolph's place was cute, we spent one night there in a sleepout out the back. There were four guys talking Czech bagpipes in a mixture of Czech, English, and German, so I listened for a while, then one pulled out a fiddle too. The music had overtones of Scottish tunes but it was quite different. Still, it was interesting. They made us a traditional dish of dumplings and mushrooms for dinner, which was REALLY good. They were very kind to us.

Friday morning we visited the Monastery before leaving Kremsmunster. The church there I rank among the most beautiful I've ever seen. I haven't seen the whole world but most of the places we've gone to we've visited some kind of church or cathedral, and this one's special. It was more the atmosphere than the decorations to be honest, although maybe I just enjoyed the absence of graphic sculptures showing people's faces twisted in pain. It was more focussed on paintings.

Back in the Czech Republic (still no passport control :()we stopped at another Monastery, only the attraction here was the Museum of the Post Office. It was very interesting, because they had the displays in english too!! I was very happy. Did you know the post was originally set up to carry official messages only? And that private correspondence was only permitted from the 1700's? Or that postmasters used to collate the news received and produce leaflets, which were the forerunners of modern newspapers? Which is why so many papers contain the word 'Post' in their title? Or, my favourite fact, the Posthorn was used to warn the station that was being approached, of how many horses they needed to prepare and how much mail they had to handle?

That night there was a rehearsal for some kind of folk performance the next day. Mike plays bagpipes in this group. I went along out of interest, also to the performance the next day. There was dancing and singing too. I recognised some of the dancing stuff but some was little strange. Like when the guys got these metre-long stiff plaits and 'whipped' the women as part of the dance. It was kind of disturbing actually.
The performance was for a reunion in a nearby village. People who used to live there came back for a day and yeah, village reunion.

Saturday we hung out with some neighbours for a bit and they gave us this gorgeous cake...so I asked how to make it, and was pleasantly surprised when they invited me back that evening to bake it with them as they needed to make some more anyway. It was a sort of sponge-but-not-really with pieces of fruit pressed onto the surface, then topped with a butter-sugar-flour crumble...yummy...

Then we went back to the village reunion, after it had cooled down a bit (it was so hot!) to see what was going on. Mike went to the local pub (which is only open Fridays and Saturdays!) for a drink before we left so I drove there. It was strange, driving on the right. But the roads were back-country, empty...so we didn't see many other cars. And no huge farm vehicles either for which I was grateful. Those roads are quite narrow.

Sunday we stopped by Peter and Katagina's place for a shower again before hitting the road for Domaszlice. The trip was mostly uneventful, except for when it started raining so hard we could barely see the road right in front of us, so we had to pull over and wait for a few minutes. It was hailing too.
So here I am! We're staying in another friend's place, they have a 'guest' part of the house with it's own kitchen and bathroom so it's quite a nice setup. When we got here a posthorn Mike had ordered had arrived, so now we have eight? musical intruments. Tuba, Eupho, Baritone, Flugelthing, Posthorn, Piano, bagpipes, violin...And a Swedish Shepherd's Horn is waiting at the post office :P.