Český Krumlov

So I found out last Friday that last weekend was going to be a long weekend. So I hastily made some travel plans. There was a lot of rain in the forecast all over western Europe. So I decided to head to the Czech Republic to a place called Český Krumlov (Č is pronounced like a 'ch'), where the weather forecast looked better.

Český Krumlov is a small town of about 15000 people in the southern part of the Czech Republic, close to Austria. It's only about 500km from Dresden, but it took more than 8 hours to get there, because I had to get on 3 different trains. The main part of the town is almost completely surrounded by a river, which was a great place to build a castle. At least it was a long time ago. This town was put into the UNESCO list of world heritage sites in 1992. As a result, Český Krumlov gets a good volume of tourists. Most of the tourists I saw were Austrian, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Personally, I liked this place more than Prague. It is much less crowded and much more relaxing. Also it's much cheaper.

On Saturday morning, I took the 9 am train from Dresden Hauptbahnhof to Prague, where I switched to another train which took me to a fairly large town called České Budějovice. From there I jumped on another train to Český Krumlov.

On a side note, České Budějovice is where the originial Budweiser is brewed. Budweiser was a name that was stolen by an American beer company in the late 19th century because it was synonymous with good beer. Too bad they didn't steal the recipe as well. The Czech Budweiser is a much better tasting beer than the American Budweiser.

The Czech Republic doesn't have the nice train stations like the Germans do.

The Czech countryside from the train.

Budweiser...

I arrived at Český Krumlov at about 6:30pm. Here's a view of the town from my downhill walk from the train station.

A view of the castle.

A glass of Budweiser.

A street lit up at night.

The castle tower at night.

The castle at night.


Another shot of the castle.

It was a pretty humid night. You can see the humidity from the flood light.
A shot of the main square at night.

A shot of the main square during the day. The weather was awesome that day.

A wooden bridge leading to the castle.

There was a lot of rafting and canoeing going on. Here’s a shot of a pair sliding down this artificial dam.

I climbed the castle tower, and took a bunch of pictures. The weather couldn’t have been better for this.





I walked through the castle grounds, which was quite spacious and nice.



A nice garden inside the castle grounds.


A view from beside the river.

I tried to take a panoramic shot. It turned out decent…

One of the most interesting parts of traveling is meeting other travelers and locals. From the bottle left: An American from Hawaii, an Englishman, an American from Oregon, a Czech local who lives with her family which includes 3 goats, a hostel worker from Norway. It was a bit tough to converse with the Czech girl, because she knew Czech and German, but only a little English. I tried using my limited German, but it was pretty useless.

On my way back to Dresden, I stopped at České Budějovice for a few hours to take a look around the town, and to drink the original Budweiser in the town that it originated. České Budějovice has a huge square in it’s old-city centre.

It was a pretty nice area with the narrow cobblestone streets.


A view of the river that passes through České Budějovice.

A pretty cool picture I took on the train to Prague.