How many times have you been dying from the boredom while waiting on the train station? In Dobrotice (Czech Republic) that wouldn’t happen for sure, even if your train had a few hours delay. The thing making waiting there more meaningful than elsewhere is the former train station and its current inhabitant who turned it into a weird house of toys.
It’s unbelievable how the saddest things can be turned into something beautiful. Moreover, the mix of beauty and sorrow creates such an amazing combination that they can be easily called a masterpiece. A perfect example is a cute stone sculpture of the house that made me stop for a while and make a few shots. Seeing it you barely would be to think about anything sad, and only the nicest thing would come to your mind if not mentioning the fact that it’s situated in the graveyard.
Have you ever seen the art gallery that is open 24/7, no matter what’s the weather or the season of the year? You can find it in Svídnice (Czech Republic)—one of the houses there is decorated with lots of pictures and is definitely a nice surprise for any art lover who by some reason visits this village. Below is a quick tour on this open-air exhibition.
It had been a while since I got to know about this place. Just a random photo of a weird gate decorated with toys seen on the Internet and no information or exact details apart from a very approximate location. It seemed to be impossible to find it, however, this place stuck in my mind and one day while planning a trip to one undiscovered part of Prague (Czech Republic) I recalled that the approximate location of the strange gate should be somewhere nearby. I still didn’t have any hope to find it and continued preparations for the trip making a virtual walk on Google Street View in order to see what’s worth visiting there. To my big surprise, one of the first things that I saw was the weird gate and this is how I ended up making quite a long stop while exploring this area.
What can you expect to see following the streets of the big city? I guess anything apart from something that doesn’t fit a typical metropoly landscape at all—a colourful and joyful house situated at the foot of the huge rock. This accidental find on one rainy day forced me to go one more time to a bit remote part of Prague where it was located and see it again—this time painted with the sunlight.
Somewhere in a beautiful valley, a few metres away from the road followed by those enjoying the previously mentioned beauty, something completely opposite can be found. A long and dark tunnel which taking into consideration its peaceful surroundings looks like the gate to the hell.
A few photos taken in the railway tunnel in one of the big cities in the Czech Republic. It could be quite calm place to escape from the city noise if not the trains going there from time to time.
I had many doubts about that trip. Going to visit the place which had been already under demolition didn’t sound very promising. What will we find there? Only ruins? Will we find there ANYTHING? Nevertheless, one thing was sure—the condition of the building won’t be better, so the only option was to leave the city for a while and follow the road the same foggy as unsure the destination of the trip was—an abandoned heating plant situated in the small town in the Czech Republic. Surprisingly, after reaching the place all doubts faded away, as the demolition turned to be the unique occasion to see the agony of the building which, due to the bright sparks coming from the cuts of its heavy constructions, looked as a dying steel monster.
If I had to choose one special thing about that trip it would be definitely lots of dogs that started barking loudely immediately after seeing someone entering the village. This is something that helps to imagine what kind of place was my travel destination—the settlement so small and remote, that its quadruped protectors treat as an intruder everyone whom they haven’t seen yet. Taking the above into consideration, as well as the fact that there should a good reason for visiting a random remote village in the Czech Republic, it’s easy to guess that something worth seeing is hidden there—the goal of the trip was a small but impressive abandoned church.
DISCLAIMER. Prague is a beautiful city with lots of impressive sites to see, which make it worth coming here even from the other side of the world. The idea to show this part of the town was based on the belief that the most interesting places are the undiscovered ones and their obscureness is their beauty. This article cannot be treated as a travel guide while planning a trip Prague.
It was just an aimless walk following the random streets of Prague. Completely randomly one of them brought me to Vysočany. Definitely not that part of Prague where you can find most of historical monuments or other ‘must see’ places. On the other hand, isn’t such unknown area the best when you don’t care about the destination at all?
Continue reading “The Unknown Side of Prague. Part 2: A Few Sights from Vysočany [Czech Republic]”