i have completely updated my Ron Matus trip photo page.
it's a weird story how the trip came about.
i have a friend (we'll call her "E") here who works at the school that i used to work for and she is from Iowa. her boyfriend ("M"), at that time, worked in a pub. E had given M an Iowa State sweatshirt as a gift and he happened to be wearing it one night when he was working.
a man, Ron Matus, walked into M's pub and, upon seeing M's sweatshirt, said "I'm from Iowa." M directed Ron to E, since she was the origin of the sweatshirt. Ron and E started talking and it turned out that Ron's grandfather had immigrated to the U.S. from what is now the Czech Republic. so, having long held ambitions to see his ancestral hometown, Ron finally bought a ticket to visit the Czech Republic.
the thing was that he didn't want to drive all over the Czech Republic. he wanted some help and company. so at first he asked E and M and he told them that he would take care of their hotel, food and transport bills... but unfortunately, neither could help because they both had to work. E directed him to me, since i was and still am working on a business plan but otherwise free.
i met him and he said that he wanted to go for about a week. unfortunately, i did not have the time to spend that long on the road with him. but we did agree to three days on the road. i agreed to go on Friday evening...
on Sunday evening i realized that earlier that week i had agreed to go to a dinner party for my friend and his girlfriend who was visiting from the states.
so on Monday, i went to his hotel and we picked up a rental car and drove to Kutna Hora, which is about 80km E of Prague. we would use Kutna Hora as a base of operation for our trip.
Monday afternoon we walked around KH a bit (see photos), before i hopped a train back to Prague. that's right, i returned to Prague for the dinner party. but i also caught a train back to KH late that night.
the next day was the big day for Ron - it was the day where we would find Bily Kun, his ancestral hometown. we embarked mid-morning and i got a little lost quite quickly before setting us on the right course.
we stopped in Luze, a small town which we knew to be near Bily Kun and asked somebody for directions. we were on the right track.
we continued to Bily Kun, which was a small village with a long-closed pub and a very small general store that was open for two hours about every other day of the week. it was an off-day.
we drove around a bit. we tried to talk to a (very bored) young teenager who kept cruising around the village on his moto to find out if anybody in the town had the last name Matus. the teenager rattled off sentence after sentence in Czech and i could only catch bare snippets. i kept saying that i spoke very little Czech and he kept rattling off long phrases. it became apparent pretty quickly that the effort to communicate was in vain, since the teenager didn't speak any English.
we drove around the countryside surrounding Bily Kun a little bit before heading back to Luze, where we looked around a cemetary and a (closed) castle before snagging a quick drink.
we stopped in a few other towns on our way back to Kutna Hora, but only for a few moments in each place. that night we grabbed dinner in the hotel and a desert in a local cafe. i went on an hour long walk by myself after Ron went to bed. (that is where the night photos come from.)
the next (and final full) day, Ron was game to go and do anything. he left it up to me. i had been reading a Czech and Slovak Republics guidebook during the entire trip in my downtime as unofficial tour guide and i suggested a local castle.
so we drove to Kacina, which was beautiful, but the tours were long and only in Czech, which deterred us away from the interior tour. as that had only killed a little time, i suggested Telc, which was a favorite place for the guidebook authors. it would be a longer drive than any we had done yet, but that didn't matter. we were both curious to see it.
we started the drive. the countryside we drove through reminded us both very much of the Midwest and Wisconsin in particular. this triggered the nostalgia in Ron and he began to relate many excellent biographical stories. my personal favorite being the time when he hung a 40'x10' sign on his bar in Cedar Rapids saying "Impeach Nixon" in big letters (and the "x" in "Nixon" was made into a swastika). apparently the mayor of Cedar Rapids didn't take too kindly to it. heh heh.
i wish i had taken some photos of the countryside, because it was fantastic, autumnal colors and all.
when we arrived in Telc, we walked around the Central Square and explored the Palace a bit before going shopping. Ron had been looking for a good place to buy gifts for his friends and family back home and Prague is a commercially-laden tourist nightmare. way too many tourists and prices 20 to 50% more than anywhere else in the country.
after shopping, we grabbed a drink before driving back to Kutna Hora for dinner.
again, after Ron went to bed, i walked around the town for awhile. it's a very romantic setting and i could feel the history as i walked down tiny, winding cobblestone streets lined with old houses.
the next day we left early-ish in order to get back to Prague and return the rental car by 11, which we did with 5 minutes to spare.
Posted by iain at November 8, 2005 05:05 PM