So much for good omens – woke up to rain. We have decided to move on tomorrow, so the valley of the watermills will have to wait until our next visit to the Czech Republic. I didn't manage to cycle anywhere either and this is an excellent area for cycling. All in all, another visit will have to be made.
The weather improved slightly so walked into Trebon for a final look around. In the château-style castle, we found a 'Man and his Landscape' museum that was very interesting. A number of small audio-visual presentations were available in English and much of the text was also translated. We learnt a lot about the town, fish ponds and the flora and fauna. This helpfully confirmed that we had seen Great White Egrets yesterday. The Trebon area is the only part of the Czech Republic where the Egrets stop on their Spring and Autumn migration route to and from a lake in Austria.
I needed to pay homage to my favourite Czech brewery before we left, so we visited the brewery tap, just inside the brewery entrance – a very pleasant and popular bar. Whilst drinking my beer, I discovered that Regent produced a yeast beer, only in draught. I therefore needed to try some and attempted to order it. Unfortunately, my Czech is non-existent and my sign language let me down. I ended up with another .5l of the same and Jane got .3l of the dark beer. Still, it was good to try the draught dark beer! Towards the end of this drink, another couple joined us at the table. They were Czech cyclists and she was a designer cyclist – very trim and very smart (= expensive) outfit. Very conveniently, he was drinking the yeast beer so, after finishing my second drink, I was able to point to his beer to explain that I wanted some. This lead to a conversation with our Czech companions – in English, of course. After some time, we were asked what we did as jobs, leading to explanations of redundancy etc. When I mentioned the words quarry, aggregate and asphalt, there was a positive reaction from the gentleman. This was rather surprising as he didn't speak English and I thought that translation through his friend was going to be difficult. In all the years that I worked at Foster Yeoman, I never met anyone socially who was in the same business. It turned out that this guy was a director of the Czech subsidiary of Eurovia, responsible for the central area of the country. An interesting discussion followed, although I didn't ask him whether he had a job for me! The couple insisted on paying the our bill despite our protests, which was very generous. Having said that, our bill for the equivalent of 4 pints of beer was 90kc (less than £3) – somewhat cheaper that it would have been in England.
The weather improved slightly so walked into Trebon for a final look around. In the château-style castle, we found a 'Man and his Landscape' museum that was very interesting. A number of small audio-visual presentations were available in English and much of the text was also translated. We learnt a lot about the town, fish ponds and the flora and fauna. This helpfully confirmed that we had seen Great White Egrets yesterday. The Trebon area is the only part of the Czech Republic where the Egrets stop on their Spring and Autumn migration route to and from a lake in Austria.
I needed to pay homage to my favourite Czech brewery before we left, so we visited the brewery tap, just inside the brewery entrance – a very pleasant and popular bar. Whilst drinking my beer, I discovered that Regent produced a yeast beer, only in draught. I therefore needed to try some and attempted to order it. Unfortunately, my Czech is non-existent and my sign language let me down. I ended up with another .5l of the same and Jane got .3l of the dark beer. Still, it was good to try the draught dark beer! Towards the end of this drink, another couple joined us at the table. They were Czech cyclists and she was a designer cyclist – very trim and very smart (= expensive) outfit. Very conveniently, he was drinking the yeast beer so, after finishing my second drink, I was able to point to his beer to explain that I wanted some. This lead to a conversation with our Czech companions – in English, of course. After some time, we were asked what we did as jobs, leading to explanations of redundancy etc. When I mentioned the words quarry, aggregate and asphalt, there was a positive reaction from the gentleman. This was rather surprising as he didn't speak English and I thought that translation through his friend was going to be difficult. In all the years that I worked at Foster Yeoman, I never met anyone socially who was in the same business. It turned out that this guy was a director of the Czech subsidiary of Eurovia, responsible for the central area of the country. An interesting discussion followed, although I didn't ask him whether he had a job for me! The couple insisted on paying the our bill despite our protests, which was very generous. Having said that, our bill for the equivalent of 4 pints of beer was 90kc (less than £3) – somewhat cheaper that it would have been in England.
Photograph - view over the Trebon moat of the Regent brewery.
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