So I guess I'll try to write a little about my trip to the Czech Republic, although I've missed a lot of important things from before then as well such as Innsbruck, Venice, and life in Krakow. Oops!

We caught a 6:50 AM (absurdly early) train on May 1st for the Czech Republic, and slept for the three hour ride until we arrived in Ostrava, the third largest city in the country and pretty close to the border with Poland. We had a bit of a panic when we got to Ostrava because I remembered from trips through the city on my way to and from Vienna that there are two train stations and we weren't sure if we were at the correct one. We tried asking a conductor on the platform after jumping off the train but he didn't know English or Polish (that was odd). Luckily though, a pretty sketchy-looking man approached us as we spoke with the conductor and turned out to be our guide in the Czech Republic! His name is Zbynek Ulćak, a professor of Environmental Studies at Masaryk University in Brno. We only saw him wear two shirts for the entire 6 days that we were with him - a blue/gray one that he would wear during the day and a forest green one in the evening when we would go to restaurants for dinner. Zbynek turned out to be one of the coolest men I've ever met. He knows absolutely everything there is to know about anything and turned out to be really personable and fun to spend time with.

Our first day we spent in Ostrava. In the morning we were at an old coal mine that had closed in 1991 and been turned into a museum/tourist attraction in '93. Our tour guide of the museum and mine was a guy named Daniel who was dressed kind of like a cowboy. He didn't have a hat, but he had the denim, the belt with a huge buckle, the leather boots, etc. The museum was located in the old miners' guild hall and had really nice exhibits with old machinery from the mines and some pretty cool models of machinery that were too large and cumbersome to be brought back aboveground. The tour of the mine itself was fun although similar to our tour of the Wieliczka salt mine in February. The only difference was that the coal mine still had huge pieces of machinery set up, some of which would even run so that we get some idea of the conditions of working in the mine - it was REALLY noisy!

We ate lunch in the old miner's pub after the tour and had our first taste of Czech food - pork in a delicious creamy sauce with a huge side of potatos. Rachel and I both had lemonade to drink (of course after the local beer, Ostravar) which is always an adventure in Europe since every place somehow interprets the idea differently. This one was a pink grapefruit drink with a hint of lemon and half of full of bits of fruit. Tasty, but not lemonade.

Our afternoon activity in Ostrava was a hike to the top of a huge slag heap a few kilometers from the city center. It's a hill, the highest one around, made of jumbled rock that had been excavated during the coal mining process at a nearby mine. The heap had later been covered with some topsoil and planted trees to make a beautiful green park of sorts, crisscrossed with trails for hiking and mountain-biking. The cool part about the heap is that all of the leftover bits of coal mixed in with the rock that were uneconomical to mine a few decades ago are slowly burning in the middle of the mound, creating places where the ground surface is really hot and steam and other gases are visibly escaping. Zbynek explained why the coal burns even though it's under a huge amount of rock: all of the smaller particles (including coal dust and small bits of coal) end up at the bottom center of the pile with the large rock ends up on the outside of the mound. The spaces between the large rocks allow air to enter the mound and a chimney-effect occurs where air is sucked in at the bottom and flows up and out through the top, providing a constant flow of oxygen that allows combustion. Anyway! There was a beautiful view of the city in all directions from the top of the heap, and the surrounding area was surprisingly almost entirely green. I thought it was great although also a little depressing or empowering when Zbynek informed us that all of the green we could see used to be industrial wasteland that has been since been planted under land reclamation plans. Zbynek kept emphasizing that nature is better at reclaiming landscapes on its own than when we tamper with natural processes, mentioning that reclamation planners often include nonnative species or install weird mixes of soil types that are inefficient for reclamation and more costly.

Our final tour activity of the day was to ride the elevator to the top of the new town tower in order to see the view, which was similar to the view from the slag heap and about as high. We could see Poland, Ostrava, the old and new steelworks, and the main shaft towers for several no-longer-in-use coal mines.

Our second day in the Czech Republic, May 2, also started early with an 8:15 departure from the hotel. Our accommodations on the whole trip were really nice - Rachel and I shared a hotel room, very nice ones, every night, Brad had his own, and Zbynek shared with his brother-in-law, Michal, who was along with us for part of the trip. Anyway, we left on the second morning and drove to a nature preserve located in the White Carpathian mountains and maintained by a small NGO. One of the founders of the NGO took us on a long hike on the lower slopes of the mountains to learn about the composition of the forest and about the logging industry which had decimated it decades ago.

We spent the afternoon at the Valaśske Muzeum v Prirode (there's a carrot symbol on the first r and on the e in the last word, but I don't how to make them on my computer), a museum documenting the rural life of the Wallachian people over the past couple of centuries. They had a reconstructed wooden town, a museum exhibiting crafts and folk art, a museum full of old modes of transportation, and a valley filled with reconstructed water mills of various types: felting, saw, blacksmith, and a non-water-powered oil press. It's really impressive how much people were able to accomplish using essentially just wood.

After the museum we had an hour-long ride to Slavicin and then dinner in a small 18th-century Renaissance-y castle that had replaced an earlier one from the Middle Ages. Rachel and I went to bed really early because of the early start we'd gotten that morning. The bathroom setup in our room was really odd, with the shower bottom about a foot-and-a-half off the ground and the sink located such that half of it was actually inside the shower!

That's it for now, because it's late here and I want to do some reading before class tomorrow. But hopefully I'll get back into the habit of making fairly regular blog updates!