Hotel Sigma Olomouc

... kitsch manner (including scenes of rural life around the clocks) with about 7 clock faces that display the time in days, day of the year, month, hours & seconds, 24hour time, astrological & zodiac time... At midday it plays three traditional tunes while various characters rotate above the clock faces and finally after 6 mins (yes!! 6 mins) the gilded rooster lets out a rather limp crow...

... They both came out with three big piles of sweet, whipped cream and fruit. Mine was actually really nice though I don't think Sam was overly impressed with hers. We headed back to the hostel and got chatting to a German guy and a Finnish guy. The German was a chess master and was here for a tournament. They told us about this bar in an aeeroplane and invited us to go with them. We decided we had to check it out so agreed to go for one beer. A Californian called ...

... for Olomouc. And it cost me about 2 euros :) Which seems expensive compared to the dinner & 2 beers I had for 5 euros I guess. Not only was it just nice in Olomouc, it was cheap too!! Anyway, I ended up staying 3 nights & had to DRAG myself out of the place, cos it was either leave then or move to Olomouc. But I had plans (ok, so not really, but I had plans to make plans, & it’s sort of the same thing)

... only friend to join me for ice skating, the #6 most enticing thing about Rymarov's winter. Tragically, she suggested we take some funny photographs while skating. She wanted to skate at me and jump into my hands. "Hmm, that seems dangerous," I thought, "but dangerous for her only, so if she wants to do it, who am I to stop her?" Sure enough, I couldn't hold her weight while on skates. She fell backwards. The next morning, she found she couldn't move her neck ...

... lively and inspired while talking to me than she had been in the past.)

4. SHE WOULDN'T MEET ME ALONE (We met one time, at a concert, where we got along well, but her boyfriend came prematurely and took her away.)

And, finally:

5. MY OWN "NETRPELIVOST" (IMPATIENCE) (Having limited time, I tried to push Vika into liking me.)

In the end, I failed to win over my little, suffering Czech girl. I probably wasn't even close ...

... or giving glory to God.

Despite all my moaning I did at least come away thinking I had seen the Last Supper painted on the church’s ceiling, a not altogether common sight I would have thought. But given my evident lack of art knowledge – far less even than my basic level of theology – I could well be wrong on that one.

Back outside again, and we shared the main square with only a couple of Mums and their toddlers riding around on ...

... What little information we had gathered on it in the last few days had thus far summarised it as “as grand as Prague, but without the tourists”, though this wasn’t immediately apparent when we alighted the train. The “without the tourists” bit seemed spot on, but there was nothing in sight anywhere around the train station that offered any interesting diversions. Other than a monumentally proportioned outdoor TV screen blaring out ...

... room that was slightly not what we expected. It turned out to be a small square room that you climb around, not up. We all had lots of fun trying to climb all over the place and falling on the cushioned floors. We called it a night and headed for bed, only to be awoken in the middle of the night by a loud crash. A guy in our dorm was apparently sleep walking. His girlfriend was calling to him in a half whisper 'get back here ...

... some of us grabbed Sdrndi by his arms and legs to perform a Czech tradition. We swung him back and forth, so his butt hit the butt of the "donkey", played by Hent´a´s young girlfriend, who kneeled on all fours on the ground. (We should´ve swung him twenty-four times. Old Czechs really loathe birthdays.) The night grew colder, and the party went on around the fire. Sdrndi said, "Bottles," and he, musician Libor, and smily-drunken-bear Pavel Bem blew on their ...

... Holy Trinity Column; a baroque medley of gold and grey, completed in 1754 with a number of saints around the base and angels carrying the holy mother to the heavens. It was supposedly the single biggest baroque sculpture in all of Europe, and it was quite an impressive site to say the least. The town hall in the centre of the square was also a splendid structure, which had what was supposed to be the only communist clock in central Europe on its northern side. We ...