Today’s Letter is Z

Day 250
Day 250 should be a big day. It really is just another day, but one with a nice big round number to it. Perhaps if I had known in advance I would have planned something special, but as it is, I’m not really cognitive of the day of the week or date, let alone the day number. I guess everyday is a weekend for me.

I was up unbelievably early. The French guy, who had spent about an hour complaining about loud people in hostels the night before, was up at about 6 and must have had 100 plastic bags to pack his things in. Because of this I was way early for breakfast. I ended up getting my things packed up to pass the time. I was able to get rid of a couple of bottles and some books, making my load lighter. This made me very happy.

CFM left shortly after breakfast and I finally had some peace. I had a bus to catch, but not for a bit. I had wanted to take advantage of the free internet, but the monitor was missing. I read my book instead. I headed out a few minutes early for my noon bus. It was late and I just stood there freezing for a bit.

After an hour I got to Znojmo. I had no directions to my hostel, just a picture. I thought that it would be easy to see from the station. It really wasn’t. I wandered for some time and lucky ran into Claire and Kasey, teachers from Prague here for the weekend. They knew where the hostel was and led the way.

Once I had dropped off my things I headed out for lunch. I was a bit sick of Czech food and thought I would go to a Chinese place that I had passed earlier. I couldn’t find it, but I did find a place called the Saloon that had American flags on the outside. I felt like this was my type of place. Inside they only had Czech and German on the menu. I would have found it really funny if they didn’t have an English menu at all. Luckily they did and I got fried cheese. I guess I wanted some Czech food after all.

Znojmo was completely dead. It sort of reminded me of Cosenza in Italy. This could be a really pretty town, but its kinda falling apart. Perhaps it is good for me to go to at least one place in the CR that isn’t a UNESCO site. I wandered the empty streets for some time before going back to the hostel.

This is a holiday weekend and there was a family consisting of several generations staying here from Prague. They took over the kitchen completely. I ended up going to my room (I was the only one in there) and taking a nap. I really felt out of place.

When I woke up it was dinner time and I ended up chatting with Claire and Kasey some more. This is one of the Czech wine regions and they had tried to do some tastings today. Nothing was open so they bought a selection of wines from the Znovin vineyard instead. They were very nice and shared their tasting with me. Eventually the family came back and we sort of felt like we were intruding. It took some time, but we found a hotel bar with super cheap beer and we had a couple of drinks there. When it closed we went looking for something else, but there was nothing so we simply went back to the hostel. I was happy to see that I still had the room to myself.