They say a glass of red wine (or 6) is good for your heart....

Tiny little bus

So USAC organized a trip to the countryside villages of Moaravia for a wine tasting for us this last weekend and you can only imagine how that went... with our group especially. The wine was flowing thats for sure. So we were picked up in this tiny bus meant for 19 people, not 20....

Market with Burcek and Licorice

We had 1 extra person who had to sit on a stool in the aisle the whole ride there... so in this uncomfortable bus for 3 hours we made a few stops along the way. Geiger took us to a small town with a market where we wandered around and bought Burcek (pronounced Bur-Check) which is young wine, wine between the mashed grape stage and ripening into wine with a higher alcohol content. The young wine was excellent, it just tasted like juice and you can definitely consume A LOT of it, the downside is that you can only get it at one time during the year and only in/near wine country... Lucky for us, we can get it in Prague :)

Excellent 'why study abroad' picture. Why wouldn't you want to? Look at us!

After the market and the first taste of young wine we went to another stop and had lunch then on to our last stop before the actual winery- there was a really pretty park, a huge castle and we took a bunch of pictures and made the cover of the USAC 'why you should study abroad' pamphlet, oh- and I climbed a huge tree :)

Me, high in a big tree

 The tree was fun, I hadn't really climbed a tree in a long time and when I saw this one it was perfect, really low but sturdy branches to get in the tree and then I just kept climbing higher and higher.... It was cool being us so high, I might climb trees more often.... Read my book up there, think about stuff, you know :)


Below is a picture of the lake I was looking out at when I was in the tree, it was so calm and we were there right at sunset, my favorite time of the day! It was so perfect I didn't want to leave. I didn't expect the Czech to be so beautiful.

When you hang your camera from a tree...

Beautiful Park on one of the stops

Owners daughter 

We finally ended up at the winery at 7ish, which ended up being a good thing, we were worried about tasting wine which was taken care of.... We got there and went into a cellar, the owner explained the different things we were tasting, 4 whites and 4 reds. In between each taste, his 5 year old daughter would come out with a basket of bread to either warn off the impending drunkness... 

Wine Cellar

 After the tastings we were led up to a bigger tasting room upstairs which was really pretty... They had a buffet layed out for us, which was a nice gesture it was just all food that was so... odd... I'm grateful for sure, just getting used to my new food selections. We then were presented with 9 bottles of wine we hadnt tried downstairs and were told to 'try' then aka drink them alllll, as if 9 bottles wasn't enough, there was a pitcher on each table of young wine which was refilled twice (that I can remember) and then were told that if we wanted any of the wines we tasted downstairs, we should tell the owner and he would bring up a pitcher of it....  I think I just heard 'unlimited wine' for the evening.... have fun! Ummm yes we did have fun, a lot... The things that stick out were.... kittens, yes we all know how happy it made me to have a kitten in my possession or sleeping in my jacket the whole time! lol.
 

The first taste

Geiger, being Geiger

The sleeping arrangements for the evening were interesting too, we got in the bus and pulled up to something that looked residential and Geiger said 8 people can sleep here, so 8 people got off and then the bus drove to the next spot, also residential and he said 6 people sleep here. More people get off and we go to a 3rd location where 4 people can sleep so that left 2 more people to go to the 4th random location which Geiger said "Umm one boy, one girl sleep together, its not problem" so it became the 'honeymoon suite' and 'the lovers' Zoe and Ken went to stay in their bungalow. Leave it to USAC for random sleeping arrangements but I love it. I'll write a separate post about Geiger and USAC later so you get what it is about this whole program that I love so much!

The next morning we got up super early and waited for the bus to pick us up from what ended up being 2 locations because everyone got too drunk to walk back to wherever our random places to stay were. We all ended up crashing on floors and staying together. So we were picked up and taken to what I thought was a soup kitchen but it was just a small cafe located inside of a public pool and park. The pool was huge and a nice moss color.... but the park was awesome, it had this crazy playground equipment that you could seriously injure yourself on, so naturally we all played on it... There was a merry-go round type thing, I'll post a picture later but it had the base in the middle and 5 arms extending out to chairs on each end so 5 people sat down and pushed their feet backwards and the whole thing starts to spin and get faster and faster from the momentum, it was sooooo fun lol.


We finally go back on the bus and rode home listening to Geiger's random choice of techno/titanic/Czech book on tape of some sort... it was a long ride, and, when we would turn, the large air conditioning unit on the ceiling of the bus would pour water all over me since I was trapped in the very back corner of the bus....

All in all it was a GREAT trip, we got to see so much of the Czech countryside and it was so beautiful. There are a lot of places that most people will never get to see, when you think of going somewhere, most people just go to the bug city and see the tourist sights. Getting the opportunity to get out with our friends and see these neat places off the beaten path is an experience unlike any other, most people I have talked to don't have a program quite like ours and I feel so lucky to be here and be a part of that!