Polish Ham: This town is dead.

Boo!

Something was not right. It started last night. I went to my room, and there was someone in my bed.

"Ahh! There is someone in my bed!" I said.

The mound of covers on my bed shifted and I saw a stranger girl peer at me. "Oh, this is your bed? Sorry, we can switch back tomorrow." She rolled back over.

Um, no thanks. I grabbed my towel which was draped on the headboard, my flip flops which were at the foot of the bed, emptied out my drawer filled with all my stuff and moved it to the next empty bed.

She turned to watch me for a little bit. "I guess I should have noticed that the bedspread was not folded up like the others."

Yeah, I guess. Weird-o.

I woke up this morning early because I decided to spend the day in Kutna Hora, a historic town an hour outside of Prague. The night before I looked up the train times on the internet, and this morning at the station, I thought I had everything figured out. About twenty minutes before the train departed, I felt like something was not right, so I confirmed with the information desk. Good thing I did. I almost got on the wrong train.

When I researched for my trip to the Czech Republic, the place that intrigued me most was Kutna Hora. The Sedlec Monastery located there, in medieval times, had been a place many people wanted to be buried. Then the plague struck, they run out of spots, and so the bones of 40,000 bodies piled up. In the 1800's, a local woodcarver was given permission to use the bones to create crazy sculptures to decorate the monastery, including a chandelier that includes all the bones in the human body.

I was one of the first people to enter the place, and it was as subdued and eerie as I expected it to be. But then a giant tourist group came in, and suddenly this quiet little church might as well been the Church of Times Square. The worst was the Czech tour guide with a black leather jacket, black leather pants, a leather bag, a pointer with a feather attached, and a really loud and annoying voice that could be heard no matter where you stood. It really spoiled the whole experience for me, and when I walked out, I saw that there was more where that came from. The buses were lined up. The people were coming in flocks.

I walked into the town of Kutna Hora, which used to be a big mining town, rivaling Prague in significance until the silver ran out. I am not sure whether it was because it was a Saturday or because it was the middle of October, but there seemed to be no one around. All the streets empty, the stores closed, not a local in sight.

I followed the walking tour in my Lonely Planet guide, and then I would find the only people alive in town: the giant groups of tourists. I gritted my teeth when I passed by the leather woman guide and her group at the Italian Court. They were not the only ones. Since we were all essentially seeing the same things, sometimes these groups would overtake me and surround me. I sometimes felt like I was a little lost sheep in the wrong herd.

I tried to pass some time by having a traditional Czech meal at a pub, where almost every table was reserved for one big party. I was petrified that leather woman guide was this P. Parson character, the name which was written on a card placed on almost every table. I left before I found out.

The town has a beautiful cathedral and the sights were okay, but overall, the whole place just didn't feel right. There was no life to it at all. I wanted to see the dead, but not this kind of dead. I was happy to get on (the right) train back to Prague.

Pyramid of bones.