Let's all have another beer and a cigarette

Today was our only full day in Ceske Budejovice; it was also our only day spent in a place we were staying where we had sun all day. Not sure whether it was just the sun, but we really like Ceske. It is a pretty small city, only a little bit larger than Albury-Wodonga, and you can just about walk the entire old part of the town, which I think we must have done today.

Like almost every European city of this era, it has a river running through it, and lots of nice park land to enjoy. The buildings in our part of the town are very old, some six or seven centuries old, but they are really beautiful. In case you didn’t realise, beer is a very popular drink over here, and people consume it by the half litre. In fact, Ceske Budejovice is the home of the original Budweiser brewery, and its beer is very popular here.

If drinking beer is popular, then smoking cigarettes is even more so. We have discovered this in many countries we have visited in Europe, but the Czech Republic is among the worst. Even more concerning is the age of many smokers, with some clearly in their very early teens. Nowhere have we seen a single billboard or advertisement warning of the dangers of smoking, not that we’d been able to read it even if there had. Tonight we had our evening meal in our hotel’s restaurant and almost had to use search lights to find our meals there was so much smoke in the room.

A lovely old building near the city square

It is obvious that Ceske Budejovice is not really a tourist mecca, as there is virtually no English written anywhere. Menus, supermarkets, food stalls, they all have to be deciphered to try to figure out what is selling. Fortunately, those working in the hotels seem to have at least some English, but it is very broken at best.The other really amusing thing over here is the currency, the Koruna. It takes about twenty Koruna to make one Aussie dollar, so the denominations are pretty large. We spent 500 Koruna on a meal last night, which sounds extraordinary, but since this is really only around $25 AUD for one pork schnitzel, one beef stroganoff and one litre of beer (OMG, Alison can drink), your money does go a long way here.

The beautiful Town Hall, which plays traditional music on the hour