Day 14: Excursion, Day 3

Saturday, May 26, 2012 

Slavonice

We spent the night in Slavonice (pronounced SLAV-o-nit-seh), in a hotel run by a man and a woman who were two of the sweetest people I've met here. They gave us all an absolutely enormous breakfast. Bread! Cheese! Meat! Vegetables! Coffee! Cake! Two kinds of cake! Seconds and thirds of everything! When we left, thoroughly stuffed, they urged us to take more. They spoke just enough English, and we spoke just enough Czech, for us to tell them that we were students from America. They hadn't heard of North Carolina, though.

We had planned a few extra stops today, but everyone loved Slavonice so much that we decided to stay there for the whole morning instead. We all spent the morning wandering the town's slanted little streets and taking photographs.

It's a beautiful place; there are buildings as ornate as the ones in Prague next door to simple little gray-stucco cottages, twisting little streets and passages, a tall clock tower, crumbling castle ruins with birds nesting in the crevices, cats sleeping and sheep grazing in the cluttered little backyards nearby.

Once you get more than three or four blocks past the lovely town square (triangle), the houses give way to farmland and ancient, wildflower-sprinkled cemeteries.

Some of the other students walked all the way out into the fields and took pictures of hills and newly sprouting crops stretching all the way to the horizon. I went back to wander through some more of the quiet little back streets. 

It's been interesting to see how the buildings look in places smaller and less wealthy than Prague. Many of the patterns in Czech architecture are very simple: a factory with just the left-hand panes of each window done in yellow glass, a gray house with brown window frames, a hotel painted in gray with an orange stripe down the front, a highway wall made of two colors of panels with every fifth pair flipped. Much of their decoration consists of simply using two colors instead of one, or taking a simple pattern and changing just one section of it, or adding a single piece of decoration in just the right place. It's simple, and it works beautifully. 

They also appreciate the textures of the materials they use, both new and old. Many of the buildings are beautiful because of the wear on them, or because of repairs which have been left visible. New cement or patched stucco can become a pattern all on its own. 

Block printing 

While in Slavonice, we had a chance to try some block printing at a printing and ceramics studio near the square. They provided us with dye, rubber print blocks, and aprons, and we proceeded to stamp patterns all over the fabric that one of the teachers had brought.

I found a pattern, a color combination, and an elephant stamp I liked, and I never got around to trying any of the others. We spread the finished patterns out in the cobblestone square outside to dry in the sun.

After lunch in Slavonice (pork with dumplings and a seemingly infinite supply of bread, which seems to be standard in Czech restaurants), we finally had to move on. 

...

Weaving Mill 

Our last stop was a weaving mill in Strmilov. It was a fairly large building made up of long, low rooms full of machinery and rolls of fibers.

The same family has owned it for several generations; we were shown around by the most recent generation, a young man only slightly older than the students in our group, who explained the mill's whole process to us. They do the whole process, too - there are machines to card the wool, to comb it and spin it into thread, to wind it onto reels, and then to unwind the reels and weave the thread into cloth.

There are giant automated looms nearly two stories high, loaded with wide arrays of warp threads and long strips of complex punch cards encoded with the patterns for rugs and blankets.

They have more modern digital looms from the 1940s or 50s, but they don't like those quite so much.

Other looms require a bit more human attention to create patterns, but still automate the actual actions of weaving, with steel-pointed industrial shuttles loaded like bullets in the chambers on either end.

In among all the modern machinery - relatively speaking, since many of the machines are over a hundred years old - there are some slightly more old-fashioned methods of working with fibers.

In short, this one building appears to contain the means to perform every step of the weaving process that doesn't involve actual sheep. 

Or maybe they just didn't show us those parts. 

The same family runs a business across the street where they grow and prepare their own coffee. They said that they love coffee and couldn't find a good place to get it in the area, so they decided to just start making it themselves. I bought a small bag to take home.




...




After that, there was just the long drive back to Prague.

Tonsilitis 

On the way back, one of my roommates (all three male fibers students somehow ended up in the same room) took a sudden turn for the worse. He'd been sick for a few days, but a quick iPhone photo revealed that his tonsils were rather horrifically swollen. This could explain the apocalyptic snoring of the last few nights. He'd been holding up pretty well for the rest of the trip, but on the last leg of the bus ride, he started throwing up. Fortunately, we were almost at the outskirts of Prague by then, so it wasn't long before we got back to the Penzion and someone drove him to the hospital. 

He returned late in the evening, accompanied by one of our teachers, who gave me instructions (I was the only one in the room at the time) on what he needed to do to take care of himself and use the collection of antibiotics he'd been given. He has what is probably tonsilitis, though it could be mono or strep throat or a couple of more obscure things. I think we'll all be washing our hands even more carefully than usual for the next few weeks. 

He said the hospital was a strange experience - all those people talking about him, and he couldn't understand a word. 

...

etc. 

I'm glad we went on this trip. As much as I've come to love Prague in the two weeks I've been here, it was wonderful to see the rest of the country - the smaller, simpler towns and villages, the rural and industrial areas, and the farms and forests that stretch for miles between them. We really did see a lot of the rest of the country, too. Looking at a map afterward, our route (though incompletely marked) surrounded nearly a third of the Czech Republic before returning to Prague, the city in the center of the country in the center of Europe (or close enough).

The Czech Republic is a stunningly beautiful country - a little chipped and patched and worn around the edges, maybe, but all the more beautiful for that. Even the factories here are brightly painted, with spires and ornamentation on the top. Maybe the size of the country means that history is always nearby; maybe the lack of money makes it hard to replace it. Whatever the reason, the Czech people are still building things with a long-standing sense of aesthetics, a value for decoration, and an appreciation of beauty - both rough and polished - that has been a bit harder to find in the US since somewhere in the 1940s. 

I wish I could bring it all home with me. 

Day 13: Excursion, Day 2

Friday, May 25, 2012 

After an uneventful night at the first hotel, we piled back into the bus and moved on. First stop of the day:

Lace 

Visiting the lace factory in Drnovice was like visiting Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. 

We were not allowed to bring cameras inside, as the owner does not want pictures of the machines going public. Our guide kept us outside the door for a long time - it might have been twenty minutes - telling us about the history of the factory (and building our anticipation) before we were allowed through the front doors. 

No one goes in; no one comes out - but they still produce lace by the meter…

The first lace-making machines were apparently invented in England. This gave England a monopoly on machine-made lace, which they held onto by forbidding anyone to take the machines out of the country. They even managed to enforce this for a while. Eventually, though, a group of Czech workers took a machine apart, hid the pieces in baskets of grain and vegetables, strapped the drive shaft (too long to hide in a basket) under the keel of their boat, and smuggled the whole thing back home. The Czech Republic (or what would eventually become the Czech Republic) has been making machine lace ever since.

The factory's fabled and secret lace-making machines were fascinating to watch. They use bobbins, but these are spring-loaded industrial spools of metal and plastic, not the little wooden spindles we've been using. Threading them is a complex, multi-step process that uses a little wire tool like a triple crochet hook. The guide did it in about five seconds; he then let us try, which took about two minutes. Of the few actual humans who work in the factory, one or two are there to keep the machines running smoothly, while the rest just reload the empty bobbins. 

On a machine, the bobbins are arranged on metal discs that twist them around each other in whatever pattern is necessary to make the lace. The patterns come from loops of punched cards that are fed through the back of the machine, like a Jacquard loom. (There are apparently people whose entire job is to take lace designs and translate the complex twists and crosses into patterns of punched holes. I'd love to know how they do it.) From the bobbins, the threads go up to a central pole; this is where the lace is finished, wrapped around the pole like an intricate sleeve. A ring of metal claws goes in and out to keep each twist in place. Narrow lace designs (there were some less than half an inch wide) are usually woven with several copies at once on the same machine, wrapped around the pole and joined by a single colored thread that can be pulled out to separate them later. Wider designs require the bigger machines. The maximum width, according to our guide, is about six inches. 

There was a planter full of lace flowers outside the front door. Someone asked if they grow the lace there. The guide said yes, but it only grows a few centimeters a year.

The factory is apparently only allowed to sell lace in lengths of three meters or more; anything shorter, they simply throw away. At the end of the tour, the guide showed our group a box of these cast-off ends ("three meters or less" can actually be quite long) and told us we were free to take what we wanted. 

A hundred gorgeous lace patterns, in large amounts, free, for a group of college students majoring in things like textiles and fashion design... 

The resulting scene resembled a school of piranhas in a feeding frenzy.  

The guide watched us with an amused smile for a while, then went and got an entire plastic bag full of more discarded lace and told us we could bring it back with us. It must have weighed twenty pounds. That is a lot of lace.

Predictably, there was a second lace frenzy when we returned to the Institute and opened the bag. 

...

  Gobelins 

The Gobelins (tapestry) workshop in Valašské Meziříčí is an interesting combination of factory and museum. It also has a stork nesting on the chimney.

The first few rooms we visited were devoted to the creation of new tapestries and carpets, many of them based on photographs or paintings. Many of these are designed by the owner of the workshop.

The women work with highly trained speed, their fingers twisting and tying and beating the fibers down almost too quickly to follow. 

Further in, we visited the rooms where they restore ancient tapestries. Like all the rooms in the building, these are tall, dominated by long tables and curtained windows that let in soft, indirect light.

Rolls and skeins of thread in muted shades are heaped across the tables - a weaver's palette of colors - ready for the women to work them into the worn and mouse-eaten patches of ancient tapestries. The process takes years.

They showed us some that were finished, or nearly finished, restored to their former glory with not a seam showing.

The final section was a collection of tapestries, both old and new, hung in the tall, narrow hallways between the miscellaneous rooms of the building - restrooms, nurseries, a small cafeteria.

Some of the tapestries were based on paintings; others were of geometrical designs, woven by hand with machinelike precision. 

In the last room, a sunlit cafeteria with old wooden furniture and ceiling beams, one of our group stopped to play the piano for a while. He said he was out of practice from two weeks away from home, but the pieces he played were beautiful anyway. In the sunlit room, surrounded by old furniture and tapestries and the smell of coffee, the music was the perfect final touch.

I could have stayed there in that moment all day. 

... 

Interspar 

We either missed or didn't have a scheduled lunch destination, so we simply stopped at this building in the middle of I don't know where. (I looked at the map later and found out it was in Prostějov.) It appeared to be some kind of shopping mall. It had the largest revolving door I've ever seen.

There were actually little shelves set up inside it, which revolved with the door.

Just inside the door was a place that looked like the missing link between food kiosks and restaurants. We stopped there for lunch. I got a ciabatta and a "měšec marcipanovy." (Google translates this as "marzipan bag.") It was surprisingly sweet and dense - like chewy, sugary clay. Not like anything I've eaten before, but delicious.

...

  Lysice Castle 

Lysice ('LISS-it-seh') Castle is really more of a palace, but the foundations of the original fortification are apparently somewhere underneath the elaborately sculpted mansion that sits there now. You can still see traces of the moat.

Past the front entrance is a courtyard lined with the coats-of-arms of various related noble families.

Judging from our guide's comments, the various owners of Lysice Castle seem to have made it a collection of the best of everything. The floors are mosaic, or striped stone, or ornate inlaid wood that we had to wear special slippers to shuffle across.

The main staircase has columns, more mosaics, and a huge skylight at the top.

The ornaments are porcelain and alabaster and inlaid marble; the chapel has a traveling pipe organ that can be folded up and brought on vacations; the garden has domed flowerbeds planted with geometrical patterns of plants, surrounded by a colonnade on which one of the previous lords liked to have breakfast every morning.

Even the bathrooms have stained glass windows - though the plumbing is from the 1940s. Practically every surface is carved, painted, or inlaid with various precious materials.

The library is paneled with a rare, swirly-grained wood…

...Which is actually an imitation made by rubbing wood stain onto ordinary wood with a special cloth. (This art has been lost in the centuries since.)

The dining room has ornate floral designs molded onto the ceiling…

...Which are actually extremely convincing trompe l'oeil, painted to match the sunlight from the windows. 

The best of everything, apparently, includes the best illusions. 

...

  Telč 

We stopped for dinner in Telč. I still had half of my lunch left, so I didn't bother to look for a restaurant; instead, I just walked down to the pond we'd passed on the way in, ate my leftovers there, and spent the remaining 45 minutes watching the sunset and sketching the view. 

It was a good way to spend the last few hours of daylight before the long evening drive to tonight's hotel.