Hotel Gondola Pilsen Plzen

... and sauerkraut. Didn't really care for the dumplings and sauerkraut but the goulash soup was great.

Then on to the brewery. Pilsner Urquell has been purchased by a conglomerate, the South African Brewers or SAB but Pilsner Urquell has also become their flagship as it is such a good beer. It was our misfortune to be there on a day when they were cleaning the lines in the bottling and ...

I seemed to have developed a taste for beer on this trip (partly b/c it's too hot to drink wine!!) and no tour to Czech republic would be complete with a tour of the Pilsner Urquell brewery...


The town of Pilsner is fairly nondescript (ie/ it has no redeeming features, other than a summer installation of a pilsner beer garden and a bouncy ...

Today we went to the Pilsner Urquell brewery in Plzen. Pilsner, the type of beer, originated here, where Pilsner Urquell was brewed from local crops and local mineral water. The tour was awesome. We saw the traditional brew kettles and the modern ones, as well as a very modern new packaging plant. We also tasted some unpastuerized beer directly from fermenting barrels.

(76 miles) Slowing ourselves down has really helped us go longer while feeling like we are riding less. Today we entered the Czech Republic and found out that the roads are not as nice and little towns are run down. It's interesting the change. Everything is much cheaper here as well. We find ourselves dodging potholes more and eating out more. However so far I have taken less pictures ...

... charm, but with a patina of decay, the legacy of communism and several subsequent political unheavals. This country has one of the most fascinating political histories and we look forward to learning more as we explore. We are already crashing our way through Slavic Languages 101. I was getting a little cocky in Germany, where I was starting to get by pertty well after only a week, because there are enough similarities to English to start connecting dots. Well, THAT has certainly ...

... quite a hangover, we found out that the Solni Pension was sold out for the day, a fact that would have been nice to know before hand. So we quickly ate the breakfast of bread and vegetables and wandered around until we found a room at Pension City. We met this cool kid named Thomas who works at the pension a couple of days a week; he had nothing but hilarious words coming out of his mouth... "What do I think of the EU? ****ing EU ...

... show the driver my ticket and he blurts some phrase at me. It didn't seem like a no, so I just sat down and hoped it all works out. In the end it did, the bus left shortly after I got on ended up transporting us to the train station at Plzen. I had to take a bus from Plzen to the same city again to get home as well. I am not sure why we had to get off the train; I assume there was working being done on the ...

... a Czech/English dictionary and she was in the process of revising it. She also runs a small school. In her spare time she does tours. The trip down was lovely with all the fresh snow bright and clean. The sun shone all day. We stopped at a 13th century town called Chesky Budejovice. This is the home of the original Budweiser Beer. It is also one of the most beautiful squares in this part of the world. Each side of the square is about 400 feet long. Some of the original ...

... on the overhead bar. As we started up the hill on Seifertova St., the man on his right bumped into him and the man on his left was in and out of his pocket without MS's realizing it. Of course, they got off at the next stop. MS was still oblivious to the whole thing. On the way back to the Penzione we stopped to buy dinner. We got pork roll-ups from the butcher and potatoes, onions, and carrots from the greengrocer. When we got back to the rooms MS realized that he didn't ...

... rain, i found myself in the holiest of sanctuaries, the breweries waiting room, watching the clock tick by, wanting it so desperately to tell me that it was now half past twelve. While i anxiously glanced over the surroundings, as other beer devotee's start to stroll in for the daily tour, i catch a glimpse of the Breweries pamphlet titled, "What would you like to know". What secrets would it divulge, mysterious stories passed down through ...