Hunting

When we moved into our house we found two boar skins lying in the straw in the barn, in the house the walls of the stairwell were decorated with skulls of deer and a stuffed bird. In the local restaurants you can eat wild boar, rabbit and venison. We love it - game is a favourite food of ours. The Czechs are great ones for hunting - and it seems to be something enjoyed by all classes (unlike in England). Czech men are often dressed in the typical Czech huntsman attire - second-hand army fatigues and boots.

Across the countryside you will find hides like the one above. They look out across groves in forests, fields near to the wood edge, anywhere that deer will come to feed. Sometimes you will find a block of rock salt nearby to help attract the deer.

Yes, the Czechs are great nation of hunters..... and gatherers.

Czech Dogs

The Czechs are very fond of their dogs. The above photo shows a typical Czech dog - in other words low slung with short legs, curled tail and perky demeanour. On seeing your Czech dog you have the fun of trying to work out its mixed parentage (and grandparentage) - bit of dachshund, bit of labrador, a touch of corgi perhaps! You will find signs in the Prague warning against dog fouling in parks graphically showing a cartoon of just such a dog with curly tail raised doing its business.

Horice Na Sumave Passion Play

Horice Na Sumave is famous for its passion play. The play is performed each summer outdoors in a theatre created in a natural arena just above the town. The audience is under cover, the actors not so. The 50 performers are local amateurs and when we first saw it a couple of years ago, Jesus was performed appropriately enough by our carpenter. The play is delightful, even if we hardly understand a word, in a way only amateur productions can be, and the play has the added piquancy of the devotion of the performers.

The play has been performed since the 19th century with a break during the Nazi and Communist regimes. It even used to have its own theatre, which was destroyed by the communists. Originally it was performed in German up until the Second World War, after which the German-speaking population were expelled to Germany and a new Czech population established. Thus when the passion play was revived in 1993 it was rewritten in Czech.

As a postscript when we first moved to the area, the town used to have a hotel innocently called Hotel Passion. There was a sign for the hotel on the main road just before you came to the turn off to Horice. I note that they have now renamed the Hotel Stare Skola, no doubt because of the unwanted attention the hotel used to receive.

For more about the history of the Horice Na Sumave Passion Play - check out the dedicated page on the Cesky Krumlov website from which we have borrowed the above photo.

Chanterelles

A friend of ours, who works on the North Sea oil rigs, has just bought a forester's cottage in the woods. The house is sited right next to the forest as you would expect and there is even a small private gate from the garden that takes you immediately into the trees. To get there you climb a winding forestry road out of Cesky Krumlov, on which you will occasionally meet large forestry lorries laden with trunks coming down in the opposite direction – not something to enjoy on the narrow road, but which mean that in the winter the road is kept clear of snow.

Alongside the cottage runs a track which after a brief spell among the trees takes you to an expanse of upland grassland and spectacular views across the Sumava mountains all the way to Austria. That is of course if you get that far. The woods behind the little house are a first-class place for collecting egg-yolk coloured chanterelle mushrooms in the moss covered ground. My friend's partner being Czech born and bred has of course discovered this fact and moreover in the spell after the rain did not even make it to the garden gate and into the forest before her basket was full of these treasures with their slight scent of apricots. I do wonder however whether having mushrooms reliably on your doorstep will not in some way reduce the enjoyment of the hunt. We shall see.

Seashells in the Czech Republic

As you may recall in an earlier post as part of my decorations for our Czech house I brought over some seashells collected on a beach in Kent. I thought they would be very English objects for my Czech home, a bit of the seaside in landlocked central Europe. I very carefully washed them (so as not to smell) and placed them in a bowl of tap water on the windowsill, thus showing off their colours and patterns. There they sat for a few weeks; they sit there no longer.

The local man, who had first found the house for me two years ago, arrived one morning on my doorstep with his three children. I was pleased to see them and invited them in. Fruit tea and cola were offered and accepted and we settled down to an awkward silence. He is a man who never uses a sentence when one word will do, and often not that. My Czech was not able to sustain a one-sided conversation, and our attempts at broken German were equally short-lived.

The little lad made up for his father's silence with a running commentary in Czech on anything and everything. His father produced a small plastic toy which had come out of a chocolate egg - it was an octopus. We counted the legs - first in Czech and then in English. I had no toys to keep him occupied, but then I had a brainwave. I took the shell bowl from the window, drained off the water and showed the shells to the children. All three children including the teenage eldest daughter were totally caught up in looking at the shells. The different shells were looked at in detail, held up to the light, the razorshell became a false finger nail, the small empty crabshell scuttled again, and the shells were used to make pictures on the floor. Of particular note were the two fossilised shark's teeth, which had come from the same beach, and were suitably violent for a small boy's imagination. I suggested that the children could choose some to take away with them and a long process of selection took place. The older girls chose a few pretty shells, but the little boy found it impossible to stop - "To mam" he said over and over - "I have that".

They left clutching a bag of shells. It was fascinating to see how something that we Brits take for granted was so wonderful. These children will not have seen the sea, let alone walked on a beach collecting shells. So now the bowl is nearly empty and I will have to return to the seaside to replace its contents. There are more children in the village.

A visit to Ceske Budejovice

Normally when we go to Ceske Budejovice it is with a specific purpose - we go, do what we need to do and come away again. But a few days ago we decided to spend some time as tourists. Ceske Budejovice is a place which is often compared unfavourably with Cesky Krumlov – it is a large town and comes with retail parks, factories and all that that implies. It simply is not as pretty as Krumlov and it doesn't perch quaintly in a lovely setting.

However were it not being compared with its UNESCO-rated neighbour Ceske Budejovice would score highly on the tourist map. The old town bounded by the river on one side and moat on the other is a delight. The town square is enormous surrounded by arcaded renaissance and baroque buildings. We wandered around the square and the various streets that radiate from it – finding that Budejovice offers a far better range of shops and gifts than Cesky Krumlov does. Krumlov's shops tend to all of a kind, offering the same gifts in every shop. Why is that? Surely the tourists at whom Krumlov's shops are aiming their wares would like more variety. But no, it is all part of the lack of imagination which Krumlov displays in dealing with tourists. You will like wooden toys, amber beads and fancy soaps, or else!

But the highlight of our visit to Budejovice was unquestionably the Church of the Sacrifice of Our Lady. The church is impressive sitting on another large square, although the eye goes to the building of the former city armoury next to it first. But it is the inside of the church that excels. The medieval murals around the nave (on walls and nave pillars) are real stunners (see picture). The side aisles have some great painted vaulting brackets showing a number of gurning faces. On the altar is a panel painting of the Virgin Mary of Budejovice (early 15th century). All of which mean that the church alone makes visiting Budejovice well worth while.

More on water and the Czechs

In a previous post I talked about Czecho not having a sea - Wot No Sea. Anyone visiting Cesky Krumlov during the summer will have noticed that the Czechs enjoy messing about on the river.

The river on a sunny day will be full of Czech holiday makers in canoes, rubber rafts and even rubber tubes making their way down the Vltava. It is something of an institution for young people to have a holiday travelling down river by boat from the river's beginnings at Lake Lipno, sometimes all the way to Prague. Their goods are stored in plastic barrels, bottles of beer are trailed in the water to keep them cool and everyone has a wonderful time. There are campsites for the travellers along the river banks. There is a clear appeal to young couples - beer, freedom, and scantily clad females, but you will also see whole families in rafts making their way north.

Part of the fun is taking the various rapids along the way and falling in. The capsizing Czechs make for great free entertainment for the people lining the banks and bridges at Krumlov. People who make it through the rapids successfully get cheered and those who fall in in style are also applauded. If you fancy a go yourself there are shops which will hire you the equipment and even take you upriver to your starting point or collect you from your chosen destination. You don't even need to go far, the ox-bow bends in the river at Cesky Krumlov mean that you can just go round and round easily. Perhaps by the end of the day you too can take the traitorous rapids and stay afloat.