Weekend in Retz and the Czech Republic

Ok so time for an update. A lot of exciting things have happened since the last blog. One of which is where I did get out of Vienna to another Austrian city AND another country. Let me start from the beginning.

So my Tita took me to go with her and the Filipino VIC club for an overnight trip to the city of Retz. There was a holiday at the U.N., so no work on Monday. At first I thought it was for wine tasting (I've gotten a mini-crash course from the cousins) and so I thought why not.

Uncle Roland took Tita and I to the U.N. on Sunday, where the meeting place was. There were a bunch of people who looked familiar to me and I believe it was because I saw them during ABBA night rehersals. There I met an adorable 5 year old boy named Mico. He's so cute and he took to me almost immediately. One problem though: He only speaks German and Tagalog. He is slowly learning English and Japanese, so he has minimum comprehension of English. Eep! That was definitely a challenge for me to communicate with him.

The ride to Retz was cool. The weather was just awesome. Blue skies and not so cold either. Lots of green hills and small, quaint towns along the way. Thank goodness I had my iPod with me because sadly, the music selection on the car radio wasn't "road trip worthy." So, I created my own soundtrack with my trusty iPod. Yay me!

Arriving there, we had to find parking and when we did, we had to trek with our luggages to the hotel. Funny thing, there was actually parking in front of the hotel so the drivers eventually got the cars and parked closer.

The hotel we stayed at was cool. It was apartment style hotel rooms so some rooms had stoves and separate rooms within the rooms. The housing sitch for Tita and I was complicated at first because we thought we were going to have guy roommates but eventually it worked out and we had gal roommates instead.

The town is very rustic with old buildings and plenty of statues. I felt like I was in an old movie from the 30s. You can see from the slide show I loved the way the town looks and took as many photos as possible. Even Mico would pose for me around the town. So cute!

I eventually found out we were going to a Kurbisfest or Pumpkinfestival. Apparently it is a big thing in the region, although Retz is known for it's great wine and huge underground cellar. Tita and I had fun buying food and tasting stuff. We took a lot of photos of the different scarecrow-ish statues around the festival. We ate at this food place where they had German folk music playing. I actually wanted to try the Kurbis-burger but they ran out at the time. So instead I had schnitzel and white wine.

After awhile, Tita and I along with a handful of the ladies decided to look around and see what was around. My sweet tooth started bugging me as I passed by a cart that was selling chocolate and yogurt dipped fruit. I went for the Turkish honey and the yogurt dipped fruit. So good! Tita and the other ladies thought the Turkish honey was too sweet, so I finished it all.

We were supposed to watch the fireworks but it got really cold as it got dark. Apparently, we were at a higher elevation so it means much colder. So we headed back to the hotel and ate there.

Back at the hotel, Mico wanted me to play with him different games like Cops and Robbers, Superman and Hide and Seek. Even though I still lack German AND Tagalog speaking skills, I still managed to communicate with Mico. We hung out in the room and he pretended to be Superman getting ready for work.

Here's a video of him getting ready for work.



The next day it was cloudy, cold and foggy. Not a great day but it totally reminded me of Daly City. We all had breakfast downstairs as what Tita calls a typical Austrian breakfast. This is basically ham, cheese, bread, butter and jam. It wasn't actually bad but maybe it was because I was hungry.

After breakfast, we all got back into the cars and I heard we were going to an outlet shopping place. Yes, these actually exist in Europe. I thought great! Hoping that it would remind me of the Vacaville shopping centre in Vacaville.

Ok, so the name of the outlet place is called Excalibur. As in Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table kind of deal. Everything was designed like a theme park really. Now here's the funny part . . . we were in the Czech Republic! Yeah, I didn't even know that we crossed the border because there were no border patrols anymore. Who knew?

So I had fun shopping at the outlet, especially with the Adidas, Mango Outlet and Nike stores. We had lunch at a Chinese themed restaurant called Phenix but it served other foods like Italian and burgers.

Mico did the cutest thing by pretending to be our waiter and asking if we were hungry in German. I had someone translate for me. He came back 10 minutes later saying that he just got off work and now he was tired. All in German. Cute kid.

After lunch, we headed off to this Vietnamese store. Yes, a Vietnamese store in the Czech Republic, where the others bought all kinds of food and stuff. Mico and I explored outside and there were all these different lawn ornaments, which include an alien with a beanie on his head that had the marijauna plant on it while he was smoking weed. Sorry, I was laughing so hard I couldn't take the photo of it.

Mico decided he wanted to model for me and I took a ton of cute photos of him posing by the interesting objects around the store.

From there, Tita and I were dropped off back to the U.N. where Raffy picked us up. Whew! What a weekend!