A bit off the beaten path in Slavonice, Day #1 - April 2019
Friday, 5. April 2019 -- (excerpts from my journal The Euro Traveller, vol. 2)
We left Bratislava for Brno by bus at 9 o'clock in the morning. Our bus left late so we were pressed for time, once we got to Brno, to make our connecting bus for Dačice. We had to rush to platform #44 inside the enormous covered bus station. We made the connection with just five minutes to spare. But now we were in for a looooong bus ride through the Moravian countryside. This was a local bus, so that meant stopping at every village and cabbage patch along the way. As I normally do in such situations, I severely limited my liquid intake: no coffee, barely even water, so that I wouldn't need a toilet. I took a bottle of water, but sipped it judiciously. Although we stopped five minutes in Jemnice, which bought me enough time to run here and there in search of a loo, I was not desperate. I managed to find a shed of some kind and ran behind that. In the rush to try to make it back to the bus before it left without me, I zipped up quickly and inadvertently caught my shirttail in the zipper, ripping that part of my shirt. Damn, it was a nice short sleeve travel shirt, too. At least if I'd been completely desperate for a toilet, ready to burst, I could've justified tearing my shirt. I made it back to the bus in time to depart and spent the next ninety minutes in utter boredom until, at last, we arrived in Dačice, otherwise known to the world as the Sugar Cube Capital. Rumour has it the sugar cube was invented here. (We confirmed that on the trip back when our bus passed a sculpture of a giant sugar cube!) Now in Dačice, I was parched, but I had access to a toilet (onboard the train) so I drank water and made up for the previous four hours or so. We waited about forty minutes and then caught a local "putt-putt" diesel train twenty minutes or so to Slavonice.
Slavonice is definitely out of the way. It would be better to come here by car, as it'd take about half the time that two buses and a train require. Slavonice is a well-preserved Renaissance-era town, about five kilometers from the Austrian border. We walked from the train station into the cobble-stoned center of this town that time and the rest of the Czech Republic seemed to have forgotten. (Indeed, few of my students or any Slovaks I knew had heard of this place.) We made a bee-line for the pension and restaurant, where Zuza had booked our room. The pension was built in a house dating to 1547. Our room was like something out of a Shakespeare play, what with its width and the vaulted ceiling, bed at one far end, etc. After getting checked in and refreshed, we went down to get something to eat in the restaurant. At that point, we made a resolute decision to stay until Monday (rather than Sunday, as was our original plan) because we couldn't justify making that six-hour bus trip back to Bratislava again with only one full day in between. I mean, come on! If we're going to come all this way, let's stay at least two full days and make it worthwhile!
In the restaurant, with an impressive selection of alcohol at the bar, which also featured busts of famous Czechs, I ordered an 11º unfiltered pilsener beer and spaghetti "aglio-olio", or spaghetti dressed with just garlic, olive oil, and chilies. The pasta lacked consistency, but the chilies-garlic-olive oil combo was pretty good and nicely balanced. But one wouldn't expect to find good Italian food in an out-of-the-way Czech town! Finally we decided to get out and explore a bit. we gazed at the old city walls and looked at the selection of old houses in town, each with a completely different façade. Some house were recently renovated while others were abandoned and lifeless, as ghosts of the past.
It was a challenge to find a working shop of any kind. The tourist information center was closed, working just limited hours in the off-season. Slavonice is definitely a sleepy place on a Friday! But that's far better than the busloads of selfie-taking tourists you see in bigger tourist traps.
We ended up finding a Jednota CO-OP where I was able to find a few beers I'm not able to find in Slovakia and to get a few snacks to keep on hand in our room. After our walk, we came back to relax in our large, cozy suite for a few hours until we decided it was time for dinner. Not having been overwhelmed with the spaghetti at lunch, I wanted to be sure to find a good place for dinner. Other than our pension and restaurant, there wasn't a smashing choice of eateries. As near as I could tell, there were three other choices, all on the main square. One of those looked really shady. We crept up the stairs only to realize the place looked like a dive, and when he heard creepy drunken laughter and singing, we decided that it probably wasn't what we were looking for. I imagined Zdeněk Pohlreich, the Czech cooking celebrity and equivalent of Gordon Ramsay, rolling his eyes and giving the middle finger salute without even sampling the cuisine. This place was off the list. The second choice was a hotel, but the restaurant was for guests only. OK, then, we'll just tip-toe on out the door. Don't mind us. That left just one last choice, which we settled on. It was a typically Czech restaurant. I started off with a 10º Gambrinus then had a Kozel black beer. I ordered breaded chicken filets with "American" brambory (seasoned potatoes). This was as quintessentially Czech as you can get. It reminded me of the meals I used to get at any number of the post-Communist era eateries I frequented in the mid-90s, back before "gourmet" or "international" food made its trendy appearance. The decor was also about that same era, everything from the old farm tools hanging from the ceiling to the 1980s classic door and fittings window fittings one would come to expect in the post-Communist Czech Republic. My food was tasty and well-prepared, if not fancy. I only wished the filets had come with more lemon garnishes. I really don't know what Mr. Pohlreich would have said about this. But I could imagine what he'd have said about the deep-fried cauliflower Zuza ordered. She said it was awful because they used frozen cauliflower instead of fresh, and it was still frozen in the middle. Mr. Pohlreich would've tossed the platter out into the street. It's a good thing the restaurant didn't have a fish pond or he'd have poisoned the poor fish. Dinner cost 200 kč (not even 10 euros), then we came "home" and slid onto the sofa to watch mindless TV talk shows. Actress Lilian Malkina was a guest of the Karel Šíp Show, and following that a documentary program about actor Ladislav Potměšil.