I really wanted to go into the mine

It was a really boring town... unfortunately.... if we could turn back the time, I would have picked another town to do a daytrip

I hate waiting

Kutna Hora and Prague

At the train station the next morning we stood staring at the board that announced the schedule for the trains that day. Nothing stood out. Nothing from all the info we had gotten the day before pointed to us getting on a train to Kutna Hora. It was very aggravating. One more stop at the tourist office got us onto the correct train.

It looks pretty quaint, and that pretty much sums it up

The Rick Steves guidebook said that you take a large train to the very outskirts of the city, and then take a smaller train to the city center. When we got to the Kutna Hora outskirts, we got off our train and looked for this smaller train, or any info about it... and there was none. We even saw graffiti that supposedly pointed the way to this smaller train, but there was none. You lied, Rick Steves!

We and 10 of our new friends all waited around, and there was no train. Eventually people crowded around the bus stop sign, and fifteen minutes later an old bus came by. We had no map, so we followed the crowd onto the bus and hoped they would get off at the city center.

We arrive in town at what seemed like the main bus station, and saw people get off, so we did too. But this is not where we wanted to be. We were still a mile or so from the city center, but they did have maps there, one of which we snagged. Thus armed, we made our way to Kutna Hora to check out the silver mine.

The most exciting thing in Kutna Hora proper

The people at the silver mine said that they were booked up for the day, but that we could join a group of Czech students, but the tour would be all in Czech (with no "GB" speaker for us to listen to even!) We reluctantly declined, and walked to the city's cathedral. It was boring.

We ate lunch at a place that looked like a lodge, where they didn't speak a lick of English. We looked up names of food in our guidebook that we could them to names on the menu. We did ok, but the service was extremely slow, even by European standards.

A flea market in our guidebook turned out to be a large garage filled with junk run by an young Asian couple.

We had a coffee and snack break in the very empty town square. Thinking back, the whole town seemed to be empty and still. Back in the day it was a bustling silver mining city, but now it's pace had slowed considerably. It was quite boring, actually. But we did see a bunch of coffee adverts that we had previous seen in the London tube stations. A bit of nostalgia there.

Bone Church

Us at the Bone church. Who is that knob behind us?

We then started our 45th epic hike, a 2-3 mile walk to the outskirts of town to see the bone church. That walk kinda sucked. It was all Czech suburban wasteland, but once we got to the church it got a little more interesting.

Much like the catacombs in Paris, the designers of this church has used the bones of the dead in a most decorative fashion. They even made the coat of arms of the patron family out of bones! It was freaky and surreal.

Our view for much of the day

Since we'd seen all that Kunta Hora had to offer, we made our way back to the train station, where we had a loooooong wait before the next train back to Prague came through. We spent some time talking with a family from Houston (who seemed to me to be of Hawaiian decent, but Lin-Wei thinks Latinos). The daughter was going to school in Berlin, and the parents were out to visit.


Back in Prague

A couple of hours later we were back in Prague, where we took a tour of New City. By New, they meant it was new 1000 years ago, but it still looked pretty nice. Ice cream was had, and we got to see an Australian bachelorette party causing a stir as they walked through the crowd.

We had dinner again on the old town square--tourist gratuity generously added.

Czeiffel Towers and Dancing Buildings

Copyright (c) The Sticklers 2006