south bohemia!

I got back this afternoon from an awesome trip to south bohemia! (which basically is just the south central part of the czech republic).. But it was really cool!
On friday morning we took a bus from prague to the Castle Hluboka which was really cool. We were there for awhile and walked around through the castle gardens and stuff. After that we went to this little zoo in that town. So little in fact, that it is the smallest zoo in the czech republic! (although they did have a bear!)..
In that town there was this sweet old church too! It was yellow and it just looked awesome!

When we left Hluboka we went to a town called Cesky Budejovice! it was really nice too.. That night there was a few of us that tried to go out and get some dinner by ourselves. There was a couple of american's and a guy from canada with me and we had quite the adventure! Apparantly there was a big hockey game that night pretty close to where we were, so every restaraunt had every table reserved. I walked into about 15 restaraunts making lots of hand motions and muttering useless english words while usually i was just looked at blankly and usually got the response of a head shake and a hand wave.. it was very encouraging! finally though, after about an hour and a half we found a place! no one there spoke a single word of english, but we were able to get the job done and actually had a really good meal!
The next day we toured the real Budweiser brewery. Apparantly the American budweiser pretty much just stole the name from the czech one and then patented it... They dogged on St. Louis quite a bit throughout the tour, but we enjoyed it!
After the brewery we went to these old graphite mines which were right outside of Cesky Krumlov. They were pretty cool, but the best part of it was the suits that we had to wear and this little old train that they took us back into the mines in. It was so ridiculously small that we couldn't stop laughing till we got out of it and actually started the tour!

After the mines we went on into the city of Cesky Krumlov. It very well may be the most beautiful city I have ever seen! It is amazing! There was a big festival going on in the town so we had a good time just walking around and seeing the city. We stayed at a little hostel/pub that was right in the middle of the town and was really cool. It was one of our group leader's birthday today, so at midnight we all tried to sing Happy Birthday to her in Czech, but i doubt we were saying it right...
This morning we woke up and hiked out to these old ruins of Divci Kamen, which is an old castle. It was an amazing day, so we had a great time out there! After the ruins we came back to Prague, and although we have only been here a week it felt good to be 'home', or at least as close to home as we have here!

In case you guys haven't noticed, on the top right of the screen I put a link so that you can look at all my photo albums! I am going to try to keep up to date with that as well...