It's already mid-December, Czechs are busy preparing for Christmas. Markets are working, warm wine is offered everywhere on the streets.
The school in Poděbrady is no exception. It's no secret that learning a language without studying the culture is impossible, so teachers decided to combine business with pleasure. On Friday, December 13th, we went on an excursion around Poděbrady surroundings.
Twice a year the language center gives students the right to a free excursion somewhere. The teacher chooses the place, and UJOP provides a bus. This year 3 directions were chosen: technical museum in Prague, Škoda Auto factory, and festive Christmas excursion. Since it's believed that humanities students have nothing to do in serious places, we went to the third one :)
Mid-December - in Czech Republic it's cloudy and cool. There was already snow, but it melted in a couple of hours and didn't return anymore. In general, the atmosphere isn't Christmas-like, but autumn-like, or something. In any case, at 8 am we gathered at the bus stop. We needed to take at least 90 crowns with us - 30 for a ticket to the local ethnographic museum and 60 for a ticket to "Radim" castle.
We drove quite shortly, literally in half an hour we reached the first point. This was an ethnographic museum, there we were supposed to look at how ordinary Czechs lived a hundred years ago. After standing for about 15 minutes at the entrance, they finally let us in.
The museum greeted us with nice handmade figures. Outside, by the way, it's cool, the grass is all wet.
Cloudy, a bit dirty. All buildings are atypical Czech. Typical ones are shabby, and these are somehow polished. Even strange, an inexperienced tourist will get the impression that people lived better before than now.
Wandering around a bit, you can stumble upon what they used in work. Everything can be touched, rolled. Everything is impossibly heavy, as it should be in the village. The houses are quite similar to modern Russian dachas.
Inside almost every house there was an installation - "people who are doing something". These ones, for example, have a celebration in full swing. The installations are all typical, located very interestingly, right at the entrance, so it's always scary when you turn your head to the side and see frozen figures.
3 months of studying Czech didn't pass in vain, we understood a lot of what was written.
After about 20 minutes it seriously started to seem to me that I was at someone's dacha.
And the motifs too - men got drunk, fell, and here comes the devil (not me, standing in the photo)
Found something useful for myself - a budget version of a candlestick.
By the way, Czechs were, apparently, a superstitious people - a horseshoe is hammered into the tree at the entrance. By the way, if I'm not mistaken, this board is called "prah" (consonant with Russian "porog" - threshold). That's where it came from. By the way, look at the sneaker - already all wet, it's winter after all.
There was also an improvised school there. It showed how they organized a holiday for children. I'm not sure if everything was so simple-poor, but paper toys speak for themselves.
At 10 o'clock we left further. Next was some shop of Christmas souvenirs, on 2 floors. Inside - a crowd of people (children, mainly). I didn't really like anything, but people were buying something, some treats, some tree decorations, some - just small things. Prices, by the way, were not small.
Then we drove to "Radim" castle. The castle is unremarkable, ours is prettier. It was also sad that the whole crowd couldn't enter - we had to wait. The tour in the castle was interesting - tour guides tried to speak understandable Czech. There was nothing to look at, they mostly just told stories. Mainly they showed what food rich people ate, what - poor people, how all this was prepared.
There was nothing special to photograph, only a portrait of a dude with top-notch lips, mustache and wig. Grandpa Varlamov?
And speaking about the fireplace, the guide said nicely in Russian: "Well, here, technology". They generally like to say everything in Russian, but listen - not so much :)
And at the end we got on the bus and quickly drove home. The excursion ended there. We arrived at about one in the afternoon, students were just going to lunch. We also ran to the canteen, had lunch and went home. Didn't even get tired almost, but it was interesting.