Czech Republic and Germany (Barely)

Another week, another form of jet lag!

After China, work sent me to one of our factories supplying the European Market, Usti! Traveling to the Czech Republic involves a flight to Amsterdam, a few hours sleeping like a contortionist on anti-sleeping-benches, and another flight across Europe.

Amsterdam: Basically I can only give a 10,000' overview of the Netherlands. They love canals, farms, and windmills (both modern and historic). Done.

Czech Republic - 10,000' overview: Prague is enormous, and much heavier into industry than the Netherlands (or the US for that matter). Smokestacks dot the landscape connected via a web of powerlines and steampipes.

Czech Republic - 6' overview: It's cold here. Colder than Baltimore and significantly colder than Huizhou.

The only picture I took this night...

For the first night, we checked into our sweet hotel (I'm a sucker for Marble everything) and headed out to dinner. Only getting slightly lost we headed to the main square, watched a disappointing street performer, and grabbed dinner across the street from the oldest running astronomical clock in the world!

Then, in an attempt to power through jet lag, we set out bar hopping. First we stopped at Steampunk where they had almost-functional mechanical creations. Then we hit a "bar" bar where I remembered how much I dislike bars. Abandoning this one, we set off down a random street with the assumption there had to be a bar somewhere along it. There was! Eventually. We ended the night at Rocky Orielly's Irish Pub, where we watched Premier League and Rugby until we were absolutely exhausted. You know, around 8pm.

Best friend taking pictures. 

Sunday we woke bright and early (brighter and earlier than we expected to, at least) to see the sights of Prague! We wandered across town to the 700 yr old Charles Bridge, and then up to the 1200 year old Prague Castle.  We then waited for the sleepier half of our party to arrive, looking out over the city and fantasizing about bouncy balls.

Seriously, imagine a few hundred rubber balls here.

The castle itself was cool, cold, and quite large. Almost a small town in a wall. In retrospect, we probably should have read a guide ahead of time. For our unguided ignorant tour the highlights consisted of hot chocolate, the cathedral, and climbing a hundred meters up the bell tower. (As you may remember from Paris, this is pretty standard).

Pretty great for shove-a-camera-out-the-window-and-hope

After lunch (goulash!) we had to head out to Usti where our plant is. After a few detours down one-lane, bidirectional back roads with incomprehensible signs, we made it to our hotel!  Hotel Vertruse is a nice, non-extravagant hotel on the hill overlooking Usti-nad-Labem. it comes complete with it's own gondola, which we took down to the city center for dinner every night, and back most nights. Other nights, we had to walk up the too-steep and too-chilly switchbacks.

The week was the business-trip standard of working too long during the day and eating too much during the evenings.  Czechs love meat and starches, so every meal involved either several potatoes, or a dumpling, which is basically a boiled loaf of bread. Interspersed with working and eating, we'd routinely trust the GPS just a bit too much trying to visit local scenery.

Luckily, we finished up our build two days early! One of those days we spent trouble-shooting other products at the plant, but on Friday we headed out to see the sights!

The sights were cold. Sight #1 was Castle Strekov, Usti's very own 14th century fortress! Unfortunately, it was closed. And as every castle should be, it was impossible to "accidentally" wander into. We know, because we tried.

Abandoning castle 1 (and picking the sleepy half of our party up from the hotel), we headed out to Narnia!  Technically called Tisa

, Narnia is a rock formation that we referred to by it's starring role in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Tisa was amazing.  Once we got finished driving there (aka getting lost in the fog and narrow roads), we stopped in a climbing shop for a tourist map and set out up the mountain.  Tisa is a sandstone cliff with numerous towers, all just there for the wandering.  Unfortunately for our footing, it had also just snowed. Fortunately for our pictures, it had just snowed.  We spent a while taking photographs and standing increasingly close to the edge until our project manager started getting visibly nervous, then we wound our way down to the base.  To be fair, dress shoes a snowy twelve inches from a 60' drop was enough to make me nervous too.

There was a lot of this

The base was like an expansive version of Devils Den.  Winding trails cut around the hoodoos, while various tunnels offered shortcuts with differing degrees of difficulty. With all the bouldering available, (not to mention the dozens of trad routes we saw anchors for), I could easily spend a week exploring Tisa. Heck, I could probably even move there.

(A Jeremy has been provided for scale)

In the summer, at least. As it was, we got cold. My trigger finger was especially done with the climate. So we went back down the mountain to assure the sales-clerk she didn't need to rescue us, and buy some hot chocolate. After a small, warm, lunch we set out to find a castle! A real one this time, one we could go in.  My minimal research indicated Fortress Konegstein was the closest option, so we set out intrepidly towards Germany to see what lie over the border.

The entrance gate is castle-sized on its own.

It was dumbfoundingly large. I've seen sky scrapers smaller than this castle. We ascended over a hundred feet in an elevator - up the short side of the castle. We then wandered around the outer wall, which circled the town and forest within.  As we wandered it became clear that the castle was built on rocks similar to Tisa, only all the gaps were bridged, a wall was added, and any holes you could hide in were walled shut. Even after Mont-St-Michel this is the most impressive building accomplishment I've ever seen.  When we got around to the high-side of the castle, which overlooked the Elbe, it became clear why this castle remained in use (and of course undefeated) until 1913.

I couldn't choose which pano to use.

Like Tisa, we were eventually defeated by the elements and the kilometers we'd hiked during the day, and called it quits. After a bit of a fiasco bribing a local for Euros so we could escape the parking garage, I was nominated to drive home.  
In the dark, in a manual minivan, in a new country, where we didn't know the signs or the traffic laws. Or the GPS. It was pretty great! Except for what I think was a speed camera - we should know in a few weeks.   On the plus side, I pulled onto the autobahn, passed the "speed-limit-canceled" sign, and booked it past a polezie at 130! On the realistic side, that was 130 kph, it wasn't the unrestricted autobahn, and it was too foggy to go any faster anyway.

After that it was back to the routine cable-car, dinner, and a few hours of sleep before we woke in the dark to reverse our journey, leaving Usti before dark, briefly visiting Prague and Amsterdam, and making it home to Baltimore all the same day, thanks solely to the wonders of timezones.