cool group, here i come_

last night i returned from my weekend trip to cesky krumlov and jindrichuv hradec in southern bohemia. the verdict is now in, and i was cool enough to make friends with the economics students, as opposed to being the nerdy outkast. a total of about 20 exchange students went along for this trip, and i had never met a single one, but on the train ride to our destination, i quickly befriended a german guy and an english guy, who i ended up rooming with at our hotel/hostel. we arrived at this small town called jindrichuv hradec friday evening, got settled in, ate dinner, then our tour leaders brought us to a local bar. the reason why we stayed in this town is because one of the departments of prague's economics university is located here, so there are like 1000 students who live and go to school in this small town. saturday we took a bus to cesky krumlov (above and below), which is a really big tourist town here becuase it is such a well preserved and picturesque little town. it is actually protected by Unesco now, and they are helping to restore more of it. anyways, first we took a graphite mine tour, which i thought was quite boring, especially on the gorgeous day that we had. finally, we got to spend some time in the town, which was nice. we then took the bus back to where we were staying, so we could eat and then we went to another local bar. the next morning, it was dreary and rainy. we toured the castle in jindrichuv hradec and also saw a museum that housed the worlds largest nativity scene (they said it was in the guiness book, so i took their word for it). it was oddly impressive, yet at the same time, kinda sad seeing that two brothers spent nearly every free moment of their lives working on it. i dont have a picture to show you, cause they werent permitted, so if you are really that curious, make the trip when you get a free weekend. we werent scheduled to leave until about 6 pm, so we killed some time in this boring town by hanging out in a cafe for a couple of hours. all in all, the sights werent amazing, but now i have a grab bag of new friends to show for it.