Seoul

I arrived in Seoul and have had 2 full days there. The flight from Prague was excellent. I was worried that China Eastern would be dodgy as, but it was one of the better long haul flights I've been on. Plenty of leg room, nice food, always bringing water around and they clear the trays as soon as you've finished eating. They bizarrely make you turn your phone off and close the window shades for the entire journey. They also keep the seat belt sign on the entire way, so you're never quite sure when it's safe to go to the toilet.

I was very jetlagged when I arrived in Seoul so the first half day was wasted. The second day I went to Gyeongbokgung palace, visited the folk museum, saw the statues of Admiral Yi Sun Shin and King Sejong, and wandered around Bukchon Hanok traditional village.

I intended on doing more but around 3pm I could barely keep my eyes open so I went back to the hostel for a nap, but the nap went for 8 hours. I woke up at about midnight and could not get back to sleep.

At about 4am I gave up and decided to go for a walk and ended up in a McDonald's. A drunk old Korean man bought me a coffee and we had a broken conversation. At one point he accidently spat in my face and then looked at me as though I'd spat in his. Despite the spitting he was nice enough.

Later that day, as in, at 9am I went to visit the secret garden that is part of the Changdeokgung palace compound. It was very cold (-14) but the previous day probably felt colder because of the wind. The garden was alright. In summer it would be paradise.

I also went to the markets, but quickly realised I really don't care about markets that much so went to the war memorial. I spent a few hours there. I know pretty much nothing about the Korean War. I didn't realise how close North Korea came to winning. I also didn't know how close they came to losing. I really didn't know that most of the time it was China who was being fought.

After that I went up Seoul tower. I had intended to go at night but the jetlag was smashing me again so I went in the late afternoon. There is a cable car up the mountain then an elevator up the tower. My type of exercise. I got to the top, looked out at the city then repeated that 5 or 6 times because it seemed wrong to go back down so quickly.

I managed to stay awake until 8:30pm. Woke up at 2am but went back to sleep at 4am.

The trip to the DMZ didn't particularly interest me and I didn't really have time, but there is a spot on that tour that is technically North Korea. I thought it would be cool to do it just so I could say I've been to North Korea. Then I realised that I can just say I've been to North Korea anyway. So, I went to North Korea.

I'm now in Busan. I caught the train down and the nice Korean lady next to me gave me biscuits and this weird toffee looking bar that tasted like sticky date pudding. She didn't say a word, just put this stuff in my hand.

Will probably go meet up with Dan later this evening.

National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror

Hey, it's me again!

Too much to write about so I'll just summarise. I've spent the time since my last post in Uherske Hradiste. I quit work after a couple of months. I really hated it.

Romana and I spent most of our time fighting so we have broken up. Our idea of what a relationship should be is just too different. We are still quite good friends.

I went to the UK for a wedding about a month ago. Brendan and Bx got married in a country manor house in Somerset. It was pretty nice.

After Romana gave me my marching orders I went to Krakow and visited a friend from uni who has been living there for a couple of months. I didn't do much touristy stuff except for a visit to Schindler's factory. There weren't any jobs going. He's historically had quite a racist hiring policy so I probably wouldn't have got one anyway. It's quite a good museum now.


My plan was to go to Ukraine and visit Chernobyl but it looked like it'd require a bit of effort so I didn't bother. Instead I went back to Uherské Hradiste for a week or so then to Prague, where I am now.

While I was back in UH I found out that my residency application was rejected, so I'd have to leave anyway. As it stands I'm due to fly to good Korea in 2 days. I've done very little tourist stuff in Prague. I've taken some photos of statues with seagulls on their heads. Impressive considering Czech is landlocked.

Today I went to visit the National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror.

Heydrich was a Nazi douchbag who was in charge of the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during WW2. UK intelligence and the Czechoslavakian government in exile concocted a plan to assassinate him.

They sent 2 groups of Czechoslavakian paratroopers from the UK and dropped them near Prague. I got a little buzz to learn that pretty much all of them were Moravian and a couple were from Uherské Hradiste.

They were supposed to land in Pilsen, where the best beer comes from, but landed somewhere else. They were helped by the local resistance and made their way into Prague. They didn't really have a plan, they'd just been given 5 options. They were all variations of blowing this guy up or shooting him.

Two of the guys decided to string a wire across the road to stop Heydrich's car. Being an arrogant bastard Heydrich would ride around in a Mercedes convertible to demonstrate his confidence in his control of the protectorate. They apparently waited for hours and for some reason in this time abandoned the wire idea and instead decided it'd just be easier to shoot him.

So his car rolls along and one of the guys steps out with a sten gun and it doesn't fire. The driver panics but instead of speeding off he hits the brakes. The other paratrooper had a modified antitank grenade so he tries to lob it into the car. He misses and hits the bumper on the outside of the car. It's been set to explode on impact so it blows through the car and injures one of the paratroopers. Heydrich is injured but jumps out and a bit of a shoot out occurs. The two paratroopers jump on their bicycles and make an escape, thinking they'd failed.

But the grenade had actually wounded Heydrich. Metal shards from the car had punctured his lung and fractured some ribs. He was taken to hospital and recieved the best medical treatment available. Unlucky for him though, when the grenade ripped through the car it drove the upholstery of the seat into his body. The seat was stuffed with horse hair (I didn't realise horses have that much hair) which caused septacaemia and he died of the infection. It was the only successful assassination of a Nazi figure from Hitler's inner circle during the war.

After the paratroopers legged it, a massive manhunt started. A couple of the paratroopers turned informer and gave away the location of the others - a church just down the road from where I am now. Seven paratroopers holed up in the crypt and got into a battle with 750 ss troops. The ss tried to gas them out, then got the fire brigade to try to flood them out. Eventually the paratroopers committed suicide rather than be captured. They killed 14 and wounded 21. Badasses.

Note the bullet holes around the plaque.

The Nazis murdered the families of everyone that they discovered had harbored them, plus a bunch of political figures, plus the murder and total destruction of Lidice and Lezaky. This in turn resulted in the Munich Agreement being dissolved.

So yeah, sorry about the length of that. I'd heard about Lidice (it's a film here but I haven't seen it) but I had no idea about this assassination.

My next post will be from good Korea!

Zlin rally, wine festival, wine region

So, I'm obviously not updating this very often and I will probably continue not to.

I've started working - teaching English. I don't like it very much. I have a couple of lessons with children and they are fine. But on Friday mornings I have a 3 hour lesson with young adults. There are 19 students and they range from excellent at English to quite poor. Through the week they have Czech teachers and my job is only to focus on the speaking part of the course. It is really really difficult thinking of things to speak about for 3 hours. My knowledge of English is no where near good enough to explain why something is right or wrong. About a third of the students find the class boring and the other 2 thirds find it too difficult.

Anyway. I went to a rally in Zlin about a month ago. I forget the name but it starts with b. It completed my trifecta of motorsports and I probably enjoyed it the most. We went on Friday night when they give all the antique cars a go. They fly through the town, fishtailing around corners, spinning out, getting air off the speed bumps. It was really good fun to watch. Where I was positioned was after a corner and the cars would slide around, then the back end would flick out and suddenly the car is heading straight for you before correcting. The modern cars were faster but far less exciting. We were planning to go watch them the next day when they were on the dirt but didn't make it. I didn't really take many photos unfortunately.



The following weekend was a wine festival in Uherske Hradiste. There are 2 months of the year where it is legal to sell borchak, which is partially fermented grape juice (the English name for it is must, I believe). There are around 60,000 people that come and try all the wines and borchak from the different wineries. Because the borchak is still fermenting its taste, fizziness and alcohol content changes. I personally preferred the wine as borchak is incredibly sweet and not particularly good for your stomach.



The festival is also about the culture of the different villages around here. They all have their own traditional costumes, songs and dances. These villages are only 5 or 10 km apart so it's fairly amazing that they've maintained these different identities. The village Romana is from (praksice - pronounced prak shitza) has a costume with really big sleeves, which reminded me of napoleon dynamite so I had to get a photo.



The wine festival takes place in the square and in the park, but there is also a street that goes up the hill that has a bunch of cellars. That is where the real action takes place. There are cymbal bands every 30 metres playing traditional music while the crowd sings along. A cymbal is best described as a cross between a piano and a xylophone. It's basically a small piano that is open and you hit the strings rather than have keys. They're usually accompanied by people on violin, cello, and wine.



The weekend just gone a group of us went to the wine region. Where I am is kind of the wine region, so we went to a different part of the wine region, about an hour away. When we arrived we had a look at the sites in Breclav. There is a nifty castle and a minaret.

The minaret has a brilliant story. Some guy wanted to build a church in the town but he was denied approval, so to get back at them he built this big Islamic minaret instead. It is basically a big giant middle finger. It literally has no religious function, it's just to punish the council. Its very nice though.





On the Friday night we went out to a winery to taste some wine. While we were there the old bloke who runs the place came into the cellar to get his grandson to come do some work. His grandson was the guy doing the tasting. So we all went out and watched them press the grapes they'd just harvested. They go into a machine that crushes them a but and strips out some of the stems and seeds, then they go into another press that spins around like a washing machine and presses the juice out. It goes into a hose down into the cellar and into a big tub. It sits there for about a week and then becomes borchak. They didn't mention that they add anything so I don't really know how it starts to ferment. The walls of the cellar were covered in mould, like the white mold on cheese, and they said that it is really important for giving the wine its flavor. This is the light switch covered in mould.


After that we went deeper into the cellar and the old guy and his grandson sucked wine out of the barrels using this giant pipette contraption and we drank it. They got some of the grapes the wines were made from to show the flavour. There was one breed which tasted exactly like gummy bears. We were quite drunk by then so ended up throwing the grapes at each other and trying to catch them in our mouths.

By this stage we were no longer doing a tasting, we were just drinking with the owners. They were still working as well, pressing the grapes, but then someone starting singing so everyone started singing. I obviously didn't know the words so I just sang my own songs like a loser. Although one of the Czech songs has the line "mella mella mella mella" so I'd join in for that part. The old guy was an excellent singer.




Later on one of the guys with us decided to duck off down to the pub with a flat phone and without telling anyone. Apparently he had cracked the shits about something and had a bit of a bust up with another guy in our group. I manage to stay oblivious to this as I don't speak the lingo. For all I know everyone is fighting all the time. Anyway, while he was at the pub the police rocked up to do an ID check. He didn't have his ID (they have a national ID card here) so they took him back to the station.

Romana and I went to bed, oblivious, but apparently the others wandered the streets for an hour and half looking for him before finding him at the police station.

The next day I had an almighty hangover. We recovered through the day then walked to a neighbouring village to go to another cellar. It was a much quieter night. Some guys who own a different vineyard popped in and it turns out some of the people had met them before. So we went down to their cellar and drank their wine at a greatly reduced price (I'm fairly sure it was free). We went to go ten pin bowling but romana wasn't feeling well so we went home.

Now I'm sick with a cold.

Finally, here are some photos I took from here.

Prague, Budapest, Brno

It's been a while between blog posts, but as this is supposed to be a travel blog and I've remained largely stationary I really don't mind.

I've been spending a lot of my time trying to learn Czech. It hasn't been too successful. It is a difficult language. I probably know between 50 and 100 words, but the nature of the language is that I can't just use those words to get a simple message across. Each word has a number of different forms that need to be used correctly to state meaning.

I'm starting to get the hang of the verbs. As an example, the verb for speak is mluvit. It changes depending on who is speaking, so if I'm speaking, you're speaking, he, she or it is speaking, we're speaking, you and a group are speaking, or they're speaking the word is different. One word expresses a good proportion of a sentence, but it is a little more complicated then saying "you are", "I am" etc before the word. For that reason, the words for you, I, them etc are largely optional.

The nouns are, as far as I can tell, even more complicated. There are seven versions. I've encountered 3 so far in my studies and I don't really understand. The base noun has its ending changed depending on how the noun is being used, but if it is being used the third way I've come across it gets changed again, but according to the way it was changed the first time. There are also versions for past and present tense, so the nouns potentially have 14 versions. And of course, each word is either masculine, feminine or neutral, which also affects how it changes, and some words have masculine or feminine versions.

I'm on lesson 10 of 34, so I have a ways to go and I'm sure my explanation is incorrect, but it does serve to demonstrate how confusing it all is. It almost annoys me when Czech people speak English to me because I wonder what the point of me learning Czech is. Almost annoys me, but not quite.

A month ago I went to Prague with Romana. We stayed with her friend Barbara. Not pronounced (and probably not spelled) that way except by me. She showed us around. It was much different to last time I was there. We didn't even go into the tourist infested old town. We visited the national monument up on a hill and the technical museum. Both were very interesting.

The technical museum had a massive amount of old cars and motorbikes tracing the evolution of the technology. There were hundreds. There were also a handful of planes, a few old steam trains and some old firefighting wagons. It was really interesting. Not as interesting were some of the other exhibits. There was one about domestic appliances which was basically a collection of old blenders, stoves, toasters etc. For me that was really very dull, but I think the nostalgia value was high for Romana and Barbara. I think the mock ups of the kitchens are probably really familiar to a lot of Czech people as under communism everyone had the same.

The national monument was more about the founding of Czechoslovakia - a country that was dreaded in spelling tests around the world in the 80s; my autocorrect didn't even help me just now - and eventually the Czech Republic. For a culture so old and steeped in tradition the country is quite young. There was also a but about the hussite wars. I didn't know anything about them except for the name. I still don't know much, except that they were crusades against Bohemia (the part of Czech where Prague is) in the 15th century. It kicked off when the church got cross at the hussites for calling bullshit on their corruption and then told them they're religion wasn't even that good and they had a better, marginally different version they liked. The pope ordered a series of 5 crusades and the hussites won the lot. Afterwards they listened to Bohemian Rhapsody in celebration, but that wasn't until much much later.




The following weekend I went to Budapest to meet up with Matt and go to the formula 1. Which is what we did. The main race was rather boring. Vettel won easily and I don't think I saw anyone overtake. Apparently there was a lot of drama with Vettel's car but we couldn't get the commentary so to me it looked like he started out winning and continued to do so for 70 laps. It was still a good day out though. The speed of the cars is incredible. Matt and I went to play in a virtual reality arcade the night before. That was great! VR is fantastic.


After I got back from Budapest I enjoyed the Uherske Hradiste film festival, even though we only saw one film. It was quite good. We also started watching a horror film (only a handful of films had subtitles so choice for me was limited) but it was a little too disturbing/weird/comical. Romana didn't like the disturbing nature of it and I didn't like that we're supposed to believe this sadistic monster choked to death because he was doing a really full on evil laugh while eating a banana. Ridiculous. So we left.

The following weekend Matt came to visit Uherske Hradiste. We showed him the sites and then had a weekend of activities. We tried out the disc golf course and went to the pool. Started watching another film in the square but it was slow and a bit boring. I think it was about the UK and France abandoning Czech in WW2 so it might have been interesting.

The following day we went to the motogp in Brno. It was a rainy day and I think that made the races more interesting. We had grandstand seats and saw quite a bit of action, especially in the wetter early races. The main race was won easily by Marquez, who pitted after the first lap to change bikes for the drying track. It was a good move because he won by 18 seconds. Rossi pitted later and climbed up to 4th, so watching him was probably the highlight.


Last weekend Romana and I went to watch the local football club, Slovacko, play. They play in the national league. The match was against Ostrava, whose fans are known for being the most aggressive. I didn't see any violence and the chanting from the away end put the locals to shame. Apparently 12 away fans were arrested though. The match was he great. Slovacko won 5-2 and it was a really exciting match. I'll definitely be back to watch another game.


Finally, the only other news is that I had my interview for residency here. It was to see if Romana and I are really in a serious relationship. They interview us separately and ask a bunch of really dumb questions like "What did you have for dinner last night?", "How often do you go shopping together?, "What did you do last weekend?" and got us to draw our apartment. We answered quite a number of the questions differently, which isn't good. My interview went for 2 hours and I'm worried the translator didn't translate accurately. I argued with him a couple of times because he was of the opinion that his translation was good enough when actually he'd described events differently. We also answered a lot of questions the same but I'm worried we didn't prove we're in a serious relationship. This residency is usually for people who are married or intend to get married, something we both said we hadn't discussed.

Moravian Karst

Romana and I went on a trip to the Moravian Karst region, which is about an hour and a half away. We planned to make it a day trip but the main cave requires a reservation and Sunday morning was all that was available, so we stayed in an airbnb Saturday night instead.

On our way there were stopped off at a much smaller cave but couldn't go in as there was a wedding on. I don't know why they were getting married in a cave. Maybe they were vampires.

Instead of sitting around waiting, risking possible vampire attack, we went to a nearby town for food. The penzion we stopped at kind of wasn't open, but the guy offered to cook for us anyway. I think he was trying to impress me because I'm Australian, and he succeeded. He cooked the best meal I've had so far in Czech. It was just pork steak and stuffed potatoes but it was very very good.


We went back to the cave and joined the tour. It was in Czech so they gave me an English translation. They showed us around and we all eagerly snapped photos of stalagmites and stalactites and stalagnates that we'll never look at again. The cave was discovered when a bloke noticed snow had melted around a crack in the ground. The temperature in the cave stays 7-9 degrees all year round and the air had been venting through this natural chimney. Over the years he climbed down and explored more and more of the cave. Eventually he found the current entrance and quite frankly I don't know how he'd missed it. It's pretty big. And had a car park and stairs leading to it. Unless...





We stayed in a nearby town called Jedovnice, which is on a nice lake. The people we stayed with were apparently very nice. They didn't speak English though so I'll have to take Romana's word for it. We walked through a wheat field down to the lake and went on an impromptu pub crawl around the lake. Unfortunately we forgot to have dinner.

The next day we went to the Punkva cave. It's the main event. It was formed by the Punkva River, which flows underground. The highlight was coming out at the bottom of the abyss. In years gone by part of the cave collapsed forming a 148m deep hole. They played music when we got to the bottom to show the great acoustics.




We continued along and hopped into boats for a 440 metre boat cruise through the remainder of the cave. It was very narrow and the boat pilot man was very good navigating through some sharp bends.

After that we took a chairlift up to the top of the abyss. There wasn't much up there except a viewing platform, which gave me vertigo.

On the way home we stopped at Boskovice castle. It is an old ruined castle on the top of a hill. It shares an origin story I'm sure I've heard for other castles. The lord was lost in the woods and a peasant (a bird catcher, in this case) helped him without knowing who he was. The lord was thankful and gave him a castle.

It's naming story is brilliant. The bird catcher was enjoying his new castle but couldn't think of a name. When he stubbed his toe he had a sudden flash of insight. So he decided to name it Boskovice, which apparently translates to "I won't walk around barefoot in this castle anymore". I'm not even making that up. Legend has it that he never stubbed his toe again.

The view from the castle was probably the highlight. Here is a picture of Romana sneering at the peasants below. You can't really make out the sneer, but I'm sure it's there.



The other cool thing was this contraption:


It is a hamster wheel for people. You get in and run to turn the wheel which turns the crank and brings water up from the well. It seems like an incredibly convoluted method of drawing water which I think is why I love it.

We also visited the Jewish cemetery. We didn't spend too long there as it was very lively.


In other news, I've recieved my letter to go for an interview for Czech residency. It's on August 15th. They're going to try and sus out if Romana and I are a couple. I have to hire a translator for the interview. I just tried to do that but I couldn't because the website they gave me is in Czech.

I also finally went to drop my CV off at some schools. I got off to a cracking start when the first school was a welding school. Strangely, they were very nice and accepted my CV because they sometimes need English speakers. Most of the other schools were either closed for summer or didn't exist. I did manage to find one that was open and the guy gave me a job. He's going to email me about starting next week. I don't really know anything about salary or hours so I'm just waiting on this email. I also should probably learn how to teach English.