This may well be the only nice thing I say about Macs ever, so pay attention. I didn't need to tangle with downloading any extraneous drivers like when I try to use my camera with Windows computers. Yay. So pictures are on a computer now, but I haven't put all of them on Photobucket. The final count was 430-something.

So, what have I been doing? We went to the most boring chateau ever and saw a balcony that Napoleon stood on to announce his defeat of the Holy Roman Empire. (Yawn.) Then we drove up the great big Prace Hill and surveyed the battlefield of Austerlitz, which was the victory that Napoleon was bragging about on that balcony. There was a neat little museum, short and sweet with lots of high tech bits that moved and screens that came out of the floor and mirrors in strange places. I don't know much about the Napoleonic Wars, so it really sparked my interest. After the museum we went out to the "Cairn of Peace" a monument put up right before WWI broke out. There's a chapel under the cairn with a high vaulted ceiling and a blue and gold tiled altar and a coffin with the remains of five French soldiers. The remains were discovered in 2003, and none of the bodies is much more than 18. It was very moving. The wild weather helped get me into the mood by sending lightning forks and cannon crashes of thunder down over us, too.

Yesterday we went to a cave and a brewery. The cave had lots of pretty formations, only one piece of cave bacon but tons of straws, which the guide called something else that I will try to remember. It was one of those tours that doesn't have a lot of geology in it, just a lot of, "And this formation is called St. Matthias." There was a Niagara falls, too, because I think it's a rule that there's one formation called Niagara Falls in all caves.

The brewery... ah, the brewery. I got to nerd it up about brewing. Our guide only spoke Czech, so Merek, who is running parts of the tour while we're here had to translate. I got to help him out when he was trying to think of the word "starch" when we were talking about the malting process and sugars being created. The malt room smelled hot and sweet and was full of huge copper kettles. I took some pictures of them, because they were pretty stunning. We also walked through the maturation stage in a refrigeration unit filled with blue tile and huge concrete tubs. This brewery specializes in uncovered fermentation, so I could see the piles and billows of foam on the top of each brew vat, frothy from the agitation of a billion tiny yeast cells.

When we finished the tour they gave us all the free beer we could drink. There was, um, carousing on the bus on the way home. I was definitely involved in some of that. Singing on the way home to Olomouc from our journeys is quickly becoming a tradition. The only songs people seem to know all the words to are a Jack Black song (that is very raunchy) and The Star Spangled Banner.

Tatiana taught me the Russian word for "thank you" and a few others, but thank you is the only one I remember this morning. Prosiba.

Ciao for now!