Our 3rd day consisted of a trip to Brno, Czech Republic and Bratislava, Slovakia. We got to have a lie in this day as both places were no more than a couple of hours away from each other.
I think we may have packed a little too much in during this trip. When I was planning it I had Christmas markets in mind so I decided to try and coincide a couple of more countries with a couple more markets – to which Jamie was more than happy to oblige despite the driving she would have to do.
Jamie did a little bit of reading before the trip – as did I a couple of nights before and we realised that in the Czech Republic they have toll roads and one of them was from the Austrian border right up to Brno – go figure!
I couldn’t decide if we should get a vignette as the least amount of time you could get one for is 10 days and we were only there for a couple of hours! We decided that we would.
I went in to one garage right next to the border and didn’t get acknowledged so we went to one across the road. I bought the vignette – only to come back to the car and have Jamie point out that there was already one on there. I was mad at the fact we already had one so I promptly chucked the one I bought on the floor (It now resides on my phone cover as a reminder!)
A 10 day vignette is CZK 310 (Around £9 at the time of writing)
We finally crossed the border in the Czech Republic and were on our way to Brno. Jamie and I commented on how a border of a country could present such a vast change in the scenery and style of buildings. You could definitely tell these were of a Soviet style influence.
We followed the sat nav to where the car park was – only to find it was being worked on. We managed to get a spot at the hotel right next door – result. We were about a 5 minute walk from Náměstí Svobody – where the market was located.
We decided to head on down. It was an interesting walk on down. We had to avoid cars, trams and people. We saw a small market at Park Moravské náměsti and decided that we would head to this one after the main one.
We couldn’t help but stop and admire the street statues and architecture. There were a number of statues and a lot of architecture to admire. I think it must have taken us 15 – 20 minutes to walk the 300 metres because of all the interesting things to see.
We finally got to the market – it wasn’t one of the bigger ones we’ve seen, but that’s ok because the smaller ones have a more intimate feel and have a lot of home made crafts.
We spent about an hour looking round the market. They had stalls selling tree cakes, soaps, candles, sweets, food, souvenirs and they also had a nativity scene there. We found some of the lovely cheese we got in Warsaw here – we couldn’t resist so we got some. They served it with bread here though. Made it even more tasty!
After we were done at this market, we headed back up to the square to see what the other market had to offer – much of the same. We then headed back to the car for our trip down to Bratislava.
Stay tuned…
Here are some pics from Brno
You can find all of our Brno pics here