Hotel Plzen

... tasty.

Our trip through beer land at an end, we climb into the van to go to the Koneprusy caves. They are living caves with three levels but we can only visit 2 levels. Lots of steps, around 500. My legs are quite irritated that I went through the whole cave. Thought to give my hip some rest today by going on a tour. Opps. Forgot walking in caves is never restful for arthritis.

Fun day

... I would - as they were pretty impressive, but then you all know how to use google!!


We then had a tour of the fermentation tanks and details of the vital ingreadients (water, malt, special yeast and bacteria...). The tour concluded in obvious fashion - with a taster straight from the keg, poured by the most photographed man in Plzen!!

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.

... we camped at this weird, seemingly abandoned hotel. After we ride miles out of our way to get there this lady tells me in broken few words and mostly hand gestures that we can't stay there it's only for people of an association. I'm not sure if it was my puppy dog eyes or my deadly looks but in the end she let us camp out back. It was kinda weird because we were the only ones there.

... 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 ...

... never drink beer the same way again. By this time we were famished and decided to grab lunch in the brewery's restaurant/beer hall. The restaurant was absolutely incredible, huge plates of traditional Czech cuisine with enormous never ending mugs of beer; it was quite possibly the best meal I had during my entire stay in Europe. After the meal we went back to Zach's Pub for a nightcap where we met some people from Ireland and we ...

... attention to key engineering details like capacity, throughput, process descriptions etc. The facility was pretty cool. It has 124 fermentation tanks each with a capacity of 2,500 hecto-liters (hecto is 100). The filling rate for bottles is 60,000 per hour and for cans, 38,000 per hour. The yearly throughput is 1.8 million hector-liters of beer, but the brewery can increase capacity up to 2.8 million ...

... chops. Beer and wine to drink. The trip back was a bit harrowing because the roads were icy and snow covered. In typical Czech fashion, the driver went like a bat out of hell on the straight aways and then pounced on the brakes when we came to a curve. It is a bit unnerving to be passing up passenger vehicles at 80mph. In the Czech Republic, 24, 25 and 26 December are national holidays. On Christmas Eve, after a lunch (about $15 for the four of us) at our favorite Chinese ...

... in the wallet but he lost all the credit and cash cards, driver's license, health card, pictures of the kids, telephone card, transit pass, ring rosary, and Irish good luck card from Jude (guess it didn't work). He would have rather lost the money he was carrying. We arranged to meet the rental agent at 2:00 tomorrow to look at apartments. Another bottle of wine with FM's delicious dinner of roll-ups. To bed early but neither of us could sleep well. One really feels violated ...

... earth don't they write what we all know it really means.....if you haven't had a enema lately, you will have done so by the morning. By the way, i hope you didn't expect to get lucky tonight, cause frequent stops to the loo is a real conversation stopper. Finally when you leave the pub in the wee hours of the morning, crash to the ground in a drunken stupor, don't worry about those broken bones, you won't have felt a bloody thing. Maybe the ...