Shopping and Walking
We discover a very odd store and walk two and half hours to get an icecream.
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We are alive! And our limbs are still functioning, too. The sunburn turned out not to be too bad—although on Thursday I could have still easily hidden between the jars of tomato sauce, by Friday I had turned a more pleasant shade of reddish brownish pink. To not take any chances, and with the climb up from Karlštejn still ringing in our legs, we spent the last day of the week in the pension garden with games, books, food and drinks.
Saturday grocery-day
We had once again reserved Saturday for doing the groceries, which would not have been a memorable event if it had not been for two events. Or rather, one event and one non-event. As we had an extra hour or two in the shopping mall, we decided to get a snack and do some window-shopping. We were just doing the latter when my eye was drawn towards a sticker on the window of a cheese shop, advertising the sale of Dutch Beemster cheese. I alerted Vonne to this coincidence, to which her reply was: “I am not entirely surprised”
. I followed her gaze towards the sign above the door of the shop, which proudly announced its Dutch name “Kaas met smaak”. We looked inside and saw an Asian couple behind the counter, attending to a few customers. So there you have it: in a mall on the outskirts of Prague, a shop exists with the name “Kaas met smaak”, where people from Asian descent sell Dutch Beemster cheese to Czech people. That sort of lessens the surprise of seeing the next store over being a holandsko flower shop, full of refrigerated displays of flowers.
The non-event was the not ringing of the supermarket alarms as I passed through its checkout gates. The previous times we had visited the mall, I had managed to sound off the alarms at both Electro World and at the Interspar simply by walking through the checkout gates. Although a look in my bags and my big baby-brown eyes convinced the security not to drag me off to a Czech cell shared by a large bald man named Bubska, I had not managed to discover what triggered the alarms. I had noticed that the culprit had to be in my wallet, and I was very suspicious of one of my Dutch public transportation chipcards. I had now left those out and the result was full immunity to the sirenes and blinking lights. So thanks, NS or GVB: easy traveling in the Netherlands and outside of the country, discount on a one-way trip the local penitentiary. Always helpful.
We walk in a different direction!
The weather turned nicer than it had on the previous two days, which had been rather cloudy, so we decided to go for another walk. This time we headed north, in the direction of Mezouň, Nučice and Rudná, about the same route that the bus to Prague followed. Which turned out to be quite useful, as our timing was perfect to get an icecream in Rudná and hop onto bus 311 at Rudná Skolá (you know your village is tiny when you name a bus stop after the buildings in the village, such as the school), which in fifteen minutes took us back the same distance we had spent two and half hours walking.
I am not sure what it is, but I would love to have a recording of the in-bus announcement system, on which a Czech lady announces the names of the stops, in some cases what is located near the stops, and at one stop just outside of Prague tells a veritable story. It is all lovely pronounced and brings back the feeling of those old cassette tapes* you used to get with language courses.
I could hardly suppress the urge to repeat the names of the stops, but fortunately remembered I was in a bus full of Czech people, who would in all likelihood look at me as if I were crazy if I started reciting the equivalent of “Spaklerweg, transfer to lines 53 and 54”
. And rightfully so. One last chance at least, to listen to the recording once more tomorrow: for we visit Prague once more!