Czech Me Out: Bones, Churches, and Wine Make for a Good Time

This weekend was jam packed with enthralling spunky adventures the first being Friday's trip to Kutna Hora! We woke up bright and early and made our way to the old medieval town about 90 mins outside of Prague. Our first stop was the Cistercian Monastery aka the bone chapel that contained bones of some 40,000 medieval plague victims...yes, all completely real and once belonging to actual people. Creepy, morbid, and disturbing are words that come to mind to describe this place. The bones were arranged in various weird shapes. There was even a chandelier made entirely of bones! However, I'm not going to lie, it was pretty cool and probably my favorite stop of the trip. We then visited St. Barbara Cathedral that is considered to be the finest example of late gothic architecture in Bohemia. Fun fact, due to it's silver mining Kutna Hora was the second most important town of medieval Bohemia and competed with Prague for political power and prestige. This cathedral was beautiful and gave a view overlooking the whole town which was quite stunning. After a short lunch break, we continued onto the Museum of Silver, which was an exhibition that portrayed the entire process of the extraction of silver and production of silver coins. They also took us on a 250 meter long walk about 35 meters underground through a mining shaft built between the 14th and 16th century. There were moments where I had to completely hunch over and literally squeeze through the shaft because it was so small. I don't suffer from claustrophobia, but I had a small freak out moment because for a good time when I was hunched over and walking I realized there was literally no where I could go if something went wrong. It was a scary thought, I recommend you don't allow yourself to go there if you are ever in a situation like that.
On Saturday we left Prague once again and headed towards the South-Moravian town Mikulov where we had lunch and then took a hike up this massive hill that overlooked the whole town. The weather has been unpredictable lately, but as soon as we reached the top, the sun decided to come out and it really made the view just breath taking. After snapping some photos and relaxing a bit, we continued onto Lednice, a place that is actually on the UNESCO Heritage List as a great example of design landscaping. This park was so incredibly peaceful and angelic. We spent about 1-2 hours walking around and enjoying the weather, nature, and each others company. Our final stop for the night was Nemcicky for wine tasting and it was here we all got a little saucy. I've never been wine tasting before, so I didn't quite know what to expect. We tasted about 10 different wines starting from white, to rose, then to red. We were all fairly exhausted after walking all day and barely having any food in our system. I think it's safe to say we were all feeling pretty good after the tenth sample. We then walked upstairs where we finished our evening with dinner and unlimited wine. It was certainly a successful trip, but after spending the entire weekend away from Prague I'm happy to be back enjoying this lovely Sunday in the city of a thousand spires :)