Brno, Czech Republic

On Sunday morning we walked to the hotel down the road, where there was free wifi (no passwords needed) and a free bus ride to the tram stop (about 10 minutes drive away).   There must be an arrangement between the campsite owners and the hotel people.   Excellent.    

After a pleasant tram ride into Brno, we stopped outside a church, where Mass had just started.  Very convenient so we attended a short Mass, and then continued on our way.    

 The buildings in Brno are very grand, and many of them were only built last century.   I think the building in the photograph below was the old town hall.   Walter has just informed me this is not the old town hall.  Well it looks impressive.

 Another grand building.

  Due to the square shape of the relative new buildings, we presumed that beautiful old buildings had been knocked down during the 1950s/60s and communist style buildings built instead.  But when we went to the museum we found out that during the 1920s there was a big movement in modern and practical design in new buildings.  Apparently fans of modern architecture love Brno’s cubist, functionalist and internationalist styles.   But we did not take any photographs of the these modern buildings.

Just more photographs of the older buildings.

 Our lunch fare was typically Czech, between us we had three types of dumplings, plus pork and lots of gravy.  We have given up eating deserts as we do not want to get too fat!

 We visited the castle/rebuilt as a fortified mansion.   We visited the casements first, which is now the Museum of Prison Life. Once the top floor was used to house common thiefs, murderers etc, and the bottom layer was converted into cells for political prisoners.    During WWII the Nazis incarcerated and executed Czech partisans there.   Very grim.     Walter enjoying the sunshine outside the darkness of the prison.

There was not much room in the cells.   Not good for tall people.

 We also visited the castle’s main building which is the home to the Brno City Museum.   After paying for two floors of the museum (very complicated ticketing system) and being constantly checked by staff that we had tickets, we viewed Renaissance art, city history and modern architecture (1920’s).

In the museum there was a section for children, with workshops taking place, and an area for children to make constructions from plastic or wooden shapes.

In the castle courtyard there was a very good army band playing a variety of music.   It was very pleasant sitting in the sunshine, listening to them.  What a lovely warm feeling, listening to music and feeling the sun on one's back.   The sunshine has occurred so rarely, we had forgotten how good it feels.

 

As it was a short visit we missed out on seeing some unusual and quite remarkable sites.  One is the Capuchin Monastery where there are desiccated corpses on show in the crypt.   Not my scene really, but interesting though, in a macabre sort of way.   We would have liked to see the tunnels under the Cabbage market though.

But home again on the tram, and then the free bus to the hotel, where we quickly used the free wifi. We like all these goodwill gestures. And home in time to sit in the sunshine for an hour, which felt so good, especially as we knew it would not last.