May 7, Friday We waked up to the brittle sound from the chimes of the town hall.
| The program for the day was a trip to Krumau (Ceský Krumlov) which is a town under the cover of the castle on a hill inside a sling of the Moldau. The town has a very well preserved medieval town center and UNESCO has put this town on the World Inheritance List. |
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The road led between distant blue ridges through valleys where the apple trees flowered and the ditchsides were bordered by white blooming blackthorn. You cannot easily botanize through the bus window but I could see some well known early summer flowers which we have in Sweden too: red and white dead-nettle (Lat. Lamium rubrum, Lamium album), starflower (Lat. Stellaria). Some of the fields were totally yellow with dandelions.
| The castle has plain plastered walls nicely patterned with fake stones. |
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In the moat under the earlier draw-bridge they have a bearpit. The bears are from the Tatra monutains. |
Bottom floor is from the sexteenth century and has it's impression from the family, Rosenberg, which lived in this castle at that time. Renaissance ceilings with rose pattern, layed tables with tin plates but no cutlery, as they did not use that at that time. The upper floor is from the eighteenth century and mainly rococo. At that time the castle was owned by the Eggenberg family. A magnificient totally goldplated chariot and the uniforms of the footmen was to be seen. Here the layed tables have cutlery at the side of the plates. Grand sleeping rooms with canopies which has the practical meaning in taking care of spiders and other things that can fall down from the ceiling on the sleepers. The castle holds a magnificient ball hall, the Masquerade Hall, where the walls are richly decorated with pictures of different dressed masquerade persons.
Our luncheon was served in a former tobacco barn belonging to the castle with boar skins on the stone walls and an open fire at the hearth. The menu was garlic soup (a kind of potatoe soup), charcoal grilled pork chop with mustard and caraway cabbage and a kind of potatoe cake named "rambolac" like Swedish raw potatoe cakes ("raggmunk")
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A walk through the castle garden up to the newly reopened eighteenth century baroque theater. It has been restored to it's original state and it is the only theater of this kind except the "Drottningholm Theater" at Stockholm in Sweden.
When we came in the contrast from the sunlight outside and the darkness inside made us nearly blind, because the only light was candles. At first I thought they were living candles, but they were electric but very illusoric. An experience to listen to the guide who engagedly told about all that enthusiasm which lies behind the work of a restauration of this type when you want to use all the original outfit and just carefully replace that which has been so torn that you have to replace it for security reasons. |
After that we walked around in the alleys of the nice little town. We went into some of the shops, I saw some Bohemian glass I liked, plain and beautiful in form in contrary to all that we had seen earlier on this trip. But we think that it is too risky to take glass home in our flightpackage. What was bought was some CD-discs containing Bohemian music. When I am writing this down, I listen to some of that music, baroque music from the seventeenth century and some pieces by among others instance Smetana, Dvorák, Janacek.
The small birds were singing - among others thrush and chaffinch. Some drops of rain - the first during our trip up to this day. After that there was a fine haze over the landscape which gave it a soft tone. The road back followed the same route. For dinner we had carp in the dining room at our hotel. That fish I could do without...
May 8
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