Our Czech Adventures, Pt 2

Hello and welcome to an Adršpašské skály Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. And if you have no idea how to pronounce those Czech words, no worries! It's a mouthful and we're still working on it. Today is July 15th.

Week 2 of our Czech adventures was spent at our great-grandmother's home in Teplice nad Metují located in a gorgeous, mountainous region of northern Bohemia, a mere handful of kilometers from the Polish border. Sort of like Wannaskaland from Canada, but in the Czech Republic!

It was so buggy! It was Hruby Czech work camp. We had to do work day and evening. 

We did work like chopping down trees, chipping the branches and leaves with a chipper. (Have you ever heard of a chipper?) I picked strawberries.

We picked cherries from this really big cherry tree. 

And it was really fun because we got to pick cherries straight fresh from a cherry tree.

Yes, we did do lots of home maintenance while we were there. Great-grandma's (the mom of my mom-in-law) house is at least 100 years old and we've been steadily working on home improvements the last 20 years. When I first visited the house, there was minimal plumbing to a single sink in the kitchen. The bathroom was what I called "the indoor outhouse."  There was electricity but it was pretty bare bones. Great-grandma lived mostly on the ground floor in a room divided into the kitchen and her bedroom. A classic Czech farmhouse of stone walls and thin, durable coverings of various materials tacked to the floor.

Today, the house is painted yellow and white (on the outside).

On the inside today, there's a real bathroom with a sink, shower, bathtub and toilet. It is SO nice. The kitchen has new cupboards and an electric oven. Lots of nice, hot running water. Upstairs, there's a new bedroom with a brand new floor. New windows and a door were put in a while back. 

There were actually three buildings on the same property. There was one barn that got burned down and got rebuilt. The other two just got old and kaplooshed. The really big barn held stuff like horses, pigs, cows.

No! She (great-grandma) didn't have cows or horses. Maybe she had pigs. She had chickens, geese, and rabbits.

And two dogs - Bob and Bobinka.

Wait. Did she have ducks? I think yes.

In the one barn that had two floors, there was a cellar on the first floor with spider egg sacks. It gave me heebie-jeebies!

It gave me the heebie-jeebies too.

And it was really, really creepy. 

I found an animal skeleton - something like a deer, behind the kurnik (henhouse)! What other work did we do there?

My dad was like, "These doors and windows aren't perfect, so I'm gonna make them perfect." So he had to sand them and then he had to put on a layer of paint. It was wood paint. I don't know. He had to put on two layers - a thin layer and a thick layer of wood paint. (Still don't know what that means.)

And there were thousands upon thousands of slugs. At night, we were gone to a family's house and literally, I saw 57 or 58 slugs on the road up to the family's house. And 2 snails.

And big ones! Big snails. At the family's house, I liked their cats.

And, I got to hold a rabbit at their house. One was trying to hop away from me. The rabbit that I held was brown and I got to hold it twice. It was really fun because it was a real living rabbit. We're not talking fake. We're not talking electric. We're talking real livin' stuff.

We went to church and  - surprise! surprise! - I found a mouse turd on my dress. Which I hated.

The mouse left Lucie a nice gift.

Despite all the work, we did get to do some playing. The house also has 16 hectares of land that a local farmer rents. We hiked over the hills and up into a forest where the kids were able to climb some trees. I don't know what they were called but they had smooth, gray trunks and plenty of low limbs the kids only had to leap to reach. This area is also known for its unique rock formations found in and around Teplice. While we have visited the Teplické skály several times, Babička (grandma) decided to take us to the even more famous Adršpašské skály.

Adršpašské skály are amazing rock formations that only exist in the Czech Republic.

We climbed rocks. We saw really big rocks that looked like real-life things like a tooth, and a pitcher, and elephants, and a lion's face. 

Yeah, and we saw waterfalls. 

We saw waterfalls because the Metují River starts in this area. Remember. how we saw the water flowing in small streams along the paths? 

We saw the Devil's Bridge. We went through a tunnel and popped out the other side.

And went through Myší díra - the Mouse Hole - which was a very narrow crack between two huge, tall rocks just wide enough for a person to slip through. 

Have you ever heard of a story of a rock climber who was climbing in the canyons and his hand got stuck between two rocks? David told me this story.

(That was an American and it happened in the U.S. Here's a link to that true story.)

There was a mountain chapel in honor of all the people who climbed the rocks but didn't make it at all.

My favorite fun fact about these rocks is it was the site for one of my favorite Czech films, a fairytale called Třetí princ (The Third Prince). Another fun fact: German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited these famous rocks in 1790. (See photo below.)

My favorite thing about the Teplice trip was holding the rabbit.

My favorite part was eating the food - breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had smažák(fried cheese), yogurt, rohliky (a type of bread), buchta (a type of cake), chicken, and potatoes.

Today the hubs and David head back to the U.S. while the rest of us stay for some more Czech adventures!

Stay tuned!

Kids (2023) & Goethe (1790)

Gorgeous Teplice nad Metuji with the famous rock formations in the distance.

The Mayor & Mayoress

The Big Yellow House