last weekend in czech & germany

wow, it's getting hard to find the time to keep this up to date with all the travels i can do now. also i still have no internet connection in my apartment and i'm flat tack at work but here goes!! last weekend (my second since moving to poland) i used to do a 1500km round trip through the czech republic and germany. what a great experience it was! on friday evening after work i set off from krakow to kutna hora. kutna hora is a small town outside of prague which is most famous for its Kostnice Ossuary. this is a small church found in the district of sedlec which has used the bones of approx. 40,000 people to make works of art. there's a chandelier that is constructed using every type of bone found in the human body. there's four candelabras that are taller than me. there are four huge pyramids and the coat of arms of the family who used to rule the area. the most interesting part of the coat of arms is the depiction of a rook pecking out the eye of a turkish soldier. although this all sounds gruesome and macabre it is actually quite engaging and beautiful. i only wish my remains could be put to such a creative use someday.

from kutna hora i headed off to cheb which is a town close to the german border. of course it has the obligatory grand church and old castle. one problem (if you can call it that) with travelling around eastern europe is that one gets rather blasé about all the ancient buildings as there's just so many of them. still, it was a lovely town and a good place to visit.

i only hung out in cheb for few hours before hitting the road again as it got dark. i crossed the border into germany and parked the car in a field and slept the night in it, turning on the heater occasionally when it got a bit cold. the view in the morning as the sun rose over the fields was stunning and reminded me that i must get up early enough to see the sunrise more often. i hit the road fairly early with the intention to head straight back to kraków but as i came towards the dresden exit on the motorway decided to make a detour. it was a spur of the moment decision and one that i'm very glad i made. i'd heard of dresden but never how lovely it is. the buildings are what you expect from a european city but what i found surprising is that none of them are very old. dresden was decimated during WWII and only in recent years has its buildings been recreated. it was certainly worth the visit if only for the wonderful apfel strudel i had whilst sitting looking at the opera house and horse drawn stagecoaches.

finally i departed dresden, crossed the border back into poland and spent a few mind numbing hours speeding along the motorway back to kraków with only two accidents along the way to break the monotony. lesson learned: avoid the motorways if at all possible!!

pics are here