A World Heritage Site in Our Neighborhood

Monday, Aug. 4, 2014--Brno, Czech Republic

Our Europa Hotel is a very nice place on a boulevard.  The entire neighborhood is nice.  And just three blocks away from us is the Vila Tugendhat.  It is a 1930s modern home designed by Mies van der Rohe which is the only modern structure which has been listed as a World Heritage Site.  We walked by it today.  It's closed on Mondays, but we couldn't have gotten a tour anyway, since it is common for it to be booked up weeks in advance.  I just didn't start my planning for this trip early enough to get to such a fine point as knowing when we would be here and making reservations.  It's a beautiful home, though, and the photos show how nice it is.

Before going there, we bought our tickets for the bus trip to Prague tomorrow.  We back to the Student Agency which we had used yesterday.  The bus is cheaper and faster than the train, and there are buses leaving every half hour which makes it convenient for planning.  We got the 10:30 bus which will arrive in Prague at 13:00.

The rest of the day, we wandered around seeing various places that had alluded us so far.  The two most prominent were the Hrad Spilberk Castle (on a HIGH hill that was so difficult to climb after 3 1/2 hours of walking elsewhere) and the Masarykova University area.   We also just happened upon the automated Loutek Museum (puppet museum) clock just before noon and waited to see it activate.  Two more interesting sites were the nude man flashing his butt on the side of one of the churches (a very popular tourist site here) and an automated bomb-shaped clock downtown that has sections that turn as time progresses.
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After resting at the hotel for a couple of hours, we headed out for the evening.  Finally, we made it to the Pivnice u Capa, a restaurant I had read has good local food.  It is in the student quarter near the university.  We sat outdoors on their umbrella-covered patio in the corner of the neighborhood park.  The patio filled, and we seemed to be the only tourists there.  We drank half-liters of one of the two well-known Czech beers--Pilsner Urquell.   And we ordered two dishes that are typical Moravian food which we shared:  beef goulash with carlsbad bacon dumplings and potato pancakes and dumplings stuffed with smoked meat and served with sweet and sour cooked cabbage.  Both were delicious, and both were a bit too salty as all of our local dishes have been so far on the trip. 

One of our disappointments has been the lack of concerts to attend along the way.  We always read the posters listing concerts in each city, but August tends to be a dead time due to people being on vacation.  Today, however, we saw that there would be an open-air jazz concert in a warehouse district behind the train station, so we walked there from the restaurant.  The music wasn't really jazz; it was American pop music from maybe the 1960s and 1970s played in a jazz style.  Still, it was pleasant to sit outside and enjoy it.  The Czech band consisted of a singer/drummer, a guitarist, and a saxophonist.  It seemed to be mostly a sophisticated, but small crowd in attendance.