We left Prague 3 days ago taking the metro & bus to suburbs & immediately left the feel of the city behind, seeing mostly soviet-era tenements. No one speaks English anymore & we don't speak Czech. My little phrasebook is sorely lacking in the dictionary department. We got off the bus maybe one stop too early and were looking for the trail when we asked for help from some construction workers. After a minute trying unsuccessfully to communicate the foreman said something like "come with me" and motioned us to hop in his car. He drove us to the trail and dropped us off, with nary a word spoken between us other than dekuji (thank you).
We had a nice, suprisingly rural, walk to the trendy suburb of Pruhonice (Southwest of Prague). It was very nice there, bordering on a huge botanical garden, but the prices were really high. We had no choice but to get an expensive room but in the back of an awesome brew pub that, according to my guidebook, had some of the best beer in the country. We indeed tried their special brew, which is "high gravity" at 16 degrees (maybe 8%) and some of the best beer I've had.
The next day was the first hiking out in the real countryside and we started off on the red trail south (you can find it on the mapy.cz site). We took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up on the yellow trail and decided to keep following that one to Velke Popovice, where we are now, and where we found a more modest hotel. We're in a cukrarna (dessert shop/bakery) now drinking coffee and eating desserts for breakfast (all we could find). The normal coffee here is espresso, they don't serve filtered coffee, which suits me fine. Grocery stores are really cheap and we usually get some awesome bread & fruit in the mornings to make it through the day.
We're off to the south on the yellow trail today, probably headed for the Doly area for the night and eventually headed for the bigger town of Benesov and beyond.
Na shledanou (goodbye)
