Thu, 04 Sep 2003

author Liz	location Trio Camp, Praha, Ceská Republika
posted 12:49 CEST 07/09/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Ceska Republika ( all photos )

Litomerice, Terazín, Plzen ( 10 photos )
On Thursday we drove into town and spent an hour looking around the town square and a few of the narrow cobblestone streets of Litomerice. There were lots of old buildings, old cars and so on. We had coffee and some biscuits which we thought were shortbread, but which turned out to have sherbet in side. Nice, but a bit weird for breakfast. We found a little town market, where I got a backpack and a few other things.
The thing about the Czech republic is that just about everything is dirt cheap. Food, drink, souviners, even petrol, so all this cheap stuff is very nice after paying lots of money for our airline tickets the other day.
From Litomerice, we drove about two or three kilometres to Terazín. The whole village was turned into a ghetto for jews and other "undesirables" before and during World War II. It was run by the Nazis and conditions in the place were appalling. People had just over 1m of living space, hardly any food, hygene was terrible, I could go on and on about how awful the place was, and it was often the last stop-off point before the people were sent to Auschwitz and murdered. Not many people survived - even most of the children at Terazín ended up in the gas chambers. It was all very sad and depressing, but it was a really well set out display, and it was very interesting to learn about the history of Terazín.
We hit the road and spent an hour or two driving through lots of farmland, winding our way through village after village.
Driving in Czech takes a bit of getting used to - the roads are narrow, bendy and often bumpy, but the drivers here (especially the crazy Skoda drivers) don't really obey speed limits, overtaking zones or for that matter most other road rules. Most cars are full of dents and rust, and we even saw a Skoda that caught fire while it was just driving along the other day. At least with all these mad drivers we are having fun dodging them as they play games of chicken trying to overtake each other.
In the afternoon we came to the outskirts of Plzen (Pilsen), the original brewing place of Pilsener beer. We easily found our caravan park (Autocamp Ostende Plzen) on the outskirts of town, found a nice little spot by the lake and then headed into town. We had a ten minute walk and then a tram ride before we came to the central square, complete with huge towering church. We walked around the town for an hour or so. It is not the most exciting of places, but we still had fun exploring, before finding a busy little pub and enjoying two very big and very frothy pilsener beers.
Dinner was next, at a pizza place with delicious food and more beer. Feeling nice and full, we wandered before a bit more of the town before catching the tram and making our way back to the caravan park for the night.

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