Above: the most delicious looking ham on a spit; Sally eating a sausage (YUM); Ebony eating a chicken kebab (YUM, both from the Christmas markets in Wenceslas Square)
The shit part of traveling around Europe with no plans is that you do have to plan eventually and there’s so many options at varying prices that it sends you batty and then you get cranky. I like to be in super control all the time so running by the seat of my pants isn’t something that comes naturally. I don’t really mind that we have no plans, I just hate that it’s such a bloody effort to make them. Which means you spend half your time finding somewhere to stay, or booking plane/bus/train tickets instead of just enjoying the place. We booked tickets this morning to Berlin, with hope that it will be easier to navigate ourselves westward, towards France.
With my recent infatuation of the Soviet era courtesy of Mongolia, I’d love to go east and check everything out. Not this time though – we’re going to Germany, France and Spain and with some luck maybe Denmark? I don’t know.
We paid for a tour today. Such a good idea. Kutna Hora and the Bone Chapel. Kutna Hora’s just a really nice super old town, and the Bone Chapel is a church that houses the bones of 40,000 people who died in the Black Plague and other various events along the years. The bones are strung up around the place, to teach children about the circle of life (?!?!). Mostly skulls and femur bones. It wasn’t gory or creepy (at least I didn’t think so). It was really cold inside but I’d say that’s because the church is made of stone and has no insulation and is surrounded by trees in the middle of European winter.
I know it’s a bit anti-European of me, but I’m finding European landscapes and history so much less cooler than Mongolian history. I guess it’s because of a bunch of different reasons, but in short – Chinggis Khan conquering the world shits all over the rise and fall of numerous inbred/crazy royal families. I don’t doubt that sounds terrible, but if you were to meet lots of Mongolian people and see the landscape they have to work with, you’d appreciate anything they create for themselves so much more due to the sheer physical inhospitability AND the nomadic mindset.
Mind you, being in Europe is amazing and it’s so beautiful and so rich in history. Maybe it’s best that I say that Mongolian history is just so different to any other country’s history that it makes it exciting and interesting in such a different way.
The tour we were on just took us around a gothic style church (oh-so-beautiful), the bone chapel and around the UNESCO site of Kutna Hora – an old silver mine that was the site of many coin making centuries.
Ebony and I stopped at a cake place and ate two rounds of pastries, as well as being forward thinking and bought bread rolls for lunch tomorrow (to go with our cheese and meat). Dinner was left over cheese and meat on bread left over from yesterday. Berlin tomorrow, for three nights. Oh Germans and their sausages. And sauerkraut. And beer. And then maybe…… Copenhagen, maybe Paris, maybe the Netherlands…. We’ll see!
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