Rest day Telc

  Given all the sights a rest day can involve a lot of walking. We figure we logged at least 10 miles, much on cobblestones. Learning about the local history was a nice change from cycling.

After a good breakfast in our hotel, we walked around one of the ponds and through a church cemetery. There were some old gravestones against the church wall, but most additions were more recent and decorated with flowers. We headed to the main square of Telc and to the castle where we took the underground tour. It showed a few rooms and passages beneath the gothic portion of the castle with some emphasis on movies that had been filmed there, a little silly in some respects. After lunch we took the tour of the renaissance rooms which had baroque features, very beautiful and impressive. It’s hard to tell what’s original and what has been restored, but in any case it was magnificent. There were carved ceilings, tapestries, statues, armor, taxidermied African animals, depictions of Greek myths, paintings of former inhabitants, intricate details everywhere. It was one of the largest castles in Bohemia/Moravia. 

After the castle tour, we took a walking tour of Telc using a phone app and shared ear buds. We say the old town walls, the dry moat, heard descriptions of the “Painted Ladies” (houses) of the main square, and walked part of the castle gardens. We saw the plague column in the center of the square and learned that the hard-to-decipher carvings up the column depict boils or pustules people experienced during the plague. Ew.

We’ve seen a lot of ice cream shops and stands everywhere in Czechia. The Czech word for ice cream is “zmrzlina”, delicious to eat, difficult for a united statesian to pronounce. There are a lot of Zs and not many vowels. The Czech word for beer, “pivo”, is a lot easier.

For dinner, we walked a long way to a brew pub which wasn’t serving food that evening. It was a charming place, but perhaps they only serve food in high season. Around the corner was a grocery store, so we bought sandwich ingredients to have back in our room.

Sarah was stung by a persistent wasp on the way into town. 24 hours later, it was still uncomfortable, but it seemed like it would heal okay.