Hail fair maiden

As it turns out we couldn't get dressed up as knights and fight each other, doh! But we did see lots of other fighting at the medieval festival! We ended up spending three nights in Cesky Krumlov to be able to take in as much festival and sausages as we possibly could. Loved wandering round this really old town and stumbling on people dressed as though they had walked through a timewarp.

Highlights of the festival, of the 5 petaled rose, which has been running consecutively for the past 700 years, included a group of knights dressed in full armour going hell for leather at each other with a variety of weapons, really hitting each other quite hard!

Julian had 4 of the aforementioned sausages, while Bianca only had one sausage, but polished off 3 half chickens cooked over an open fire. We passed on the roasted pigs head, but that didn't faze the Czechs who go for the snout first, gross!

We also saw lots of medieval dancing, singing and one very strange band that set their songs to electric guitar. The highlight of Saturday was a costume parade, with what seemed like an entire towns worth of people in full costume, followed by a knights jousting touranment. Lances splintering on the chests of other knights, cool! Can you tell Julian is writing this edition of the blog...

On Sunday we nursed hangovers after staying up to watch the fireworks show over the castle, and said goodbye to one of our favourite towns, and the best hostel we have stayed in so far, to take a bus to Telc. Not much to be said about Telc, very pretty, surrounded by ponds and medieval style houses. We were pretty tired so just walked around the town, munged on pizza and stopped to watch a Czech film crew making a 'fairytale' movie.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse and it has been raining and has only been about 14 degrees, bring on kayaking in Slovenia and then warm water and beaches cruising in Croatia.

Before leaving Czech Republic we have a couple of days in Olomouc, which so far appears to be a nice town. Julian will be getting a much needed haircut tomorrow!