In the nature. On the cottage.

English teacher joke.  Czech students (all language students) have difficulties with prepositions.  And they have a tradition of going in the nature on the cottage on their weekends.  You can also rent cottages, which some friends and I did for a surprise birthday party this weekend.  Well, my friend and one of his friends' several friends....  It was a different group to be around but everyone got along alright and had fun.  After the last two weekends I'm ready to have a lazy one in the city.

The weekend actually kind of started on Thursday, (they tend to do that here) with another music night.  Different theme, we all had to create an album of 14 tracks using songs that are track one, track two, etc. on their original album.  Hard but fun!

The cottage participants: Three Czechs, two Irish, an Aussie, a Brit, a Russian, and a Texan. 

Friday afternoon we took a train to the small village of I Don't Remember the Name, then got cabs to the cottage.  Which is basically a cabin in the woods close to a lot of other cabins.  We settled in and got decorations going and waited for the birthday boy and his girlfriend to show up.  Surprise party time!  Grilled food, played cards, had cake, told jokes I will not repeat here, etc.  

Saturday we....did absolutely nothing.  Not  true, we walked to the village and sat by the lake.  Warm day but still too cold to swim.

Sunday we got up early and hiked to some natural caverns in the area.   They were pretty cool, especially since you could take boats on part of the tour.  I wasn't terribly impressed after being to Carlsbad, and it was freezing down there so there were some sullen too-cool-for-this hipster jokes from some of us on the tour.  ("I was into caves before they were popular", etc.)  What was really cool was the Macocha Abyss, (check that part out in the link).  We stood at the top of it on a dock with a rail about five feet tall separating you from a crazy high drop.  And then we saw it from the bottom after going through the caves.  We got dinner nearby but it started pouring rain so we got cabs back to the cottage.

Monday we had to clear out, but not before another bizzare Czech holiday tradition took place.  So on Christmas they kill carp on the streets.  (You remember that right?  It was like the only thing that made me happy for about a month.)  Well on Easter the men gather young willow branches and weave them together into a whip and then decorate it with pretty ribbons and flowers and whatnot.  They then go around beating the women in their life to transfer the young viril health of the tree into the women to keep them healthy and fertile for the next year.  It's good for them.  Then the women give the men shots of alcohol or money.  The men can only do it before noon though.  After that the women can throw cold water on the men.  Of course, our boys thought it sounded like a great tradition and went off to make their stick.  We cleaned up the place (and locked the doors) while they did.  We forgot about the windows though and they got in before noon.  We were (quite gently) smacked and blessed with Spring health for another year.  A couple of the boys got smacked right back or pinned down and tickled and had their shoes taken off and thrown outside.  (Only three of us there were Czech after all. It's not our tradition.) 

We made it back to Prague before dinner time and to a short work-week.  Happy Easter everybody. 


(....I feel like there was a lot of parentheses abuse in this post.)