A Long Weekend in Brno

My parents have now visited Vienna quite a lot of times, and I have obviously lived here for over 5 years (non-consecutively). While none of us has exhausted the huge amount of things to do in Vienna, the last couple of years we have spent a long weekend checking out a nearby city, making the most of the rich choice of other destinations in the area and making sure nobody gets over-Vienna'd. This year's destination choice was Brno, a place I had been through many times on the train and repeatedly heard was a good tourist destination, but a place I knew nothing about.

In case you, too, do not know anything about Brno, I will provide a few helpful hints. Brno is the second most populated city of the Czech Republic with a population of over 400,000 people. This makes it a tiny bit bigger than Austria's second city Graz, but while Graz is 2 and a half hours away by train (stupid mountains), it takes only a breezy 1 hour and 27 minute train journey almost due North of 
Vienna to reach Brno. Actually, I was really surprised by Brno's size. The train line doesn't run through the dead centre of the city and so I had never really grasped its size... Now I know why it has such a thriving swing dance scene!

The old town was where we spent more or less our entire time, and it is packed with enough things to see that we could pick and choose what we wanted and still not go to everything that might have tickled our collective fancies. The architecture is somewhat similar to Vienna's but with slightly less architectural monoculture than the first district of the austrian capital. There were a lot of ridiculously over the top decorated buildings, usually with very different motifs and architectural styles crammed right up against each other, and we had a lot of fun collecting all the different species of animal that adorned the various facades. Of special mention are four men holding up the frontage of a large building on the main square, obviously a famous tourist sight. In contrast to many of their kind, they appear extremely unimpressed with their lot, exhibiting a wide variety of annoyed expressions...

In our 3 day stay we managed to check out 3 or 4 art galleries, I climbed to the top of two different towers, we got lost for hours in the huge castle complex and (in)famous casemate dungeons, stopped by Gregor Mendel's actual monastery where he did the pea experiments, and had a semi personalised guided tour through a former nuclear shelter in the centre of town... Not to mention that we sampled the various beers and meaty, tasty dishes that the Czech republic has to offer. We also managed to stumble upon a small performance of swing and jazz music by musicians of the Brno philharmonic and a celebration of the end of world war two featuring cossack dancing and long speeches in Czech.

All in all an excellent holiday in a cool destination I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone sitting around in Vienna and wondering what to do this weekend. Or anyone sitting around anywhere else, for that matter! Hopefully you will check out my favourite 10 photos I took on my trip at the magic green hyperlink!

Bis bald,

Der Tom.