Maxi Mojitos and More

This weekend was the strangest mish mash of places to visit. We started on Saturday morning at the Shishkov Castle, which is lacking a ceiling or two, didn't house anyone important, and isn't the largest or the oldest of it's kind. Sooo...it was nice? I mean, it was a good example of a medieval castle and had some interesting preserved frescos. Since it hasn't been inhabited since about 1648, I don't really know what we were looking at a lot of the time. The tour guide didn't speak English wso we were relying on the translations of the tour guide given to us by the university, who was awful. She was a mean Czech woman with no patience for students (or intellectuals who read captions), no concept of who we were or what we already knew (or would want to know) and no great love for our professor either.

From the castle we went to a forgotten Jewish cemetery. Literally, forgotten. It was over grown and several of our shorts-and-flipflops-wearing crew were immediately fallen upon by hoards of hungry bugs. Scratchy ankles were had by all. Otherwise, the cemetery was simply that, a cemetery. In addition to dead people underground, we also were privy to several "naturally mummified" corpses on display in glass caskets in the cellar of an old Jesuit church. I think the people must have died in like 1500 but it was still awful. I don't think anyone appreciated looking at someone's Mother or sister or cousin or Great-Grandfather all dried up like an apricot. Egyptian Mummies are all wrapped up, intentionally stored for viewing the after-life and having the after-life view them. These people were buried for good and just happened to be placed in an air-tight, humidity controlled cellar for 500 years and forgotten until they were discovered during a church renovation in the 1970s. These people did not consent to being put on view and trotted out like a beaded lady at a circus for several koruna a pop. There are too many beautiful things in this world to spend your time looking at that.

We also took a tour of the second oldest Baroque Pharmacy in the world (1 of 3 surviving) from the 1500s. Not much to say about it, besides there were a lot of gross looking powders, 2 live leeches and a narwal/unicorn horn on the wall that I realllllllly wanted to own.

Really the two best things of the weekend both involved drinks. At the Mexican restaurant (or rather, Czechican-Czech/Mexican) we had dinner at we ordered a mysterious sounding "Maxi Mojito" which turned out to be a BUCKET of mojito. Glorious. We shared it between a few of us and raucous times were had by all. The evening we all stayed in the hotel and drank beerz, played cards and watched the World Cup on our microscopic tv. It was nice to all just relax together with no pressure to learn or shout over music or even look good (after you see Jesuit mummies, you're a lot less picky about wearing PJs in public).

Today we started at an old synagogue, which was beautiful. I love old holy buildings (to a certain extent, I mean, after 100 ancient celtic buildings they're all just old rocks--am I right??) so we wandered through the old, the oldest and the auxiliary to the oldest/current holocaust memorial in Pilsen.

We ended our weekend at the Pilsen brewery. WOO! We had lunch (and beer, obviously) and then went on a tour of their works and stuffs. It was pretty interesting really, I know nothing about beer. At the end we tasted un-pasterized, recently fermented beer which was actually pretty good. A lot of our group thought it was too bitter, but I actually liked it. We have a bunch of great photos so make sure to czech those out.

And now, on to stream the world cup and read about concentration camps! What a life.
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Emily