Free time in Prague

As we spent every day at the ice rink we had little free time to explore Prague. So we had to be creative.

We went to visit the Bohemian Cristal Factory.

One night we spent in a garden fest celebrating the Czech Folklore.

On another night we spent on a Jazz Boat, seeing Prague at night listening to Jazz, eating dinner and sipping wine.

We also visited the Prague castle and cathedral.

Prague

On Sunday the GPS took us right to the hotel and check in went smoothly. We walked to a nearby shopping centre, modern and undistinguishable from any in Calgary expect for the language. We had a nice Italian dinner and a pint of beer for less tan $20.00. Turned in early.

Monday we went exploring. First we drove to the Ice Arena where Chelsea will play the first two games. After some confusion we found it and reset our GPS so we can find it again. Then we drove into the old town to the Palladian Shopping Centre witch is within walking distance of all the inner-city squares and pedestrian zones. Good parkade with lots of security. This building complex housed 4 stories of parking and 5 stories of brand new shopping and restaurants on the inside and the old exciting building facades on the outside.

We walked throughout the old town and visited the tourist info centre to get maps and briefing on the town’s attractions. We ended our exploration with a brief stop at a sidewalk café.

Back to the hotel for a rest and we met up with Trevor Linda and Chelsea for the Evening Exhibition Game with Russia. We had some time to catch up with Trevor and Linda before the game and they told us all about their trip so far.

The Russian team, which plays in the Russian Major Women’s League plus a couple of reinforcements from other teams were far superior to our girls, but it is Canada against Russia and the Canadian grit showed through as we took the lead and only gave it up on a 5 on 3 with 3 seconds to go.

The American All-stars, all college age players are up next.

Hockey Tournament

Exhibition Games:
Saturday, Germany, Fuesen , Germany 5 Canada 1, Chelsea played half the game, 3 goals against.
Monday, Russia, Prague, Canada 1 Russia 1, Chelsea played half the game, 0 goals against.

Tournament Games
Tuesday, North American All Stars 6 Canada 1, Chelsea did not play.
Wednesday, Russia 5 Calgary 0, Chelsea played the whole game.

Thursday, Czech Selects 3 Vs Canada 2 Chelsea was in net and they scored with 30 seconds to go
Friday morning, Czech Club Team 2 Vs Canada 2, Chelsea was not in net
Friday noon, Slovak Club Team 3 Vs Canada 5, Chelsea was in net
Bronze playoff game taday at 10 am, Canada 4 Vs Czech Selects 1

Won Bronze Medal

Svitavy (Zwittau in German)

This is the city where the Fuchs family lived in the 1800’s. City has a beautiful inner city turned into a pedestrian district. We found a quiet hotel just outside of town which was an oasis of tranquility.

We found several Fuchs graves indicating the family did in fact live her and may still have some presents here to this day.

Brno

After visiting towns and churches that my mothers family frequented for the last 200 years we were ready to take the archives for retrieving detailed records of the lives of my ancestors. This is not an easy task since the Czech Republic underwent so many political changes over the last 100 years.

Where are the records? They were originally recorded in the Roman Catholic parishes. The communists relocated them into civic archives. Then they were centralized into 7 Regional Archives. One of these was in Brno.

With our trusty GPS we had no problem in finding it one morning. We tried to speak to the security grad/reception, who did not speak English or German. A foreign relations person was summoned. It turns out he knew little about what we wanted to do. He, wanting to be helpful, took us to the Deportment of Culture. There we had a meeting with more people drank water and chatted about life in the Czech Republic as others tried to be of assistance. It turns out the archive department dealing with parish records had moved a few months earlier and that it was to be closed tomorrow on Friday. While we chatted the officials arranged for a Dr. (of something) to come in on her day off to open the archive for us to do the research. We were given the address of the new facility and the time of 9:00am was set for our meeting. We thanked all involved and entered the new address into GPS.

The next morning we were keen on doing our work. We arrived at the address given but there was no archive to be seen. It turns out that a spelling error on my part sent us into the wrong part of town. For the next few hours we tried to find the correct address which was close to on of Brno’s major hospital. We arrived at 3pm. Needless to say the people involved in giving us their day of had not been pleased and had gone home. Even with the disappointment the local representative provided us with useful information which will come in useful for or future research activities.

Prepychy

Today we went out to find more ancestral clues and trails. We planned on visiting Prepychy, Vyrava and Cenilov, where we know at least 2 generations on Zilvars and Chudy’s lived from about1820 to 1880 before they showed up in Vienna.

A strait research……but, as I am learning, nothing is strait forward in genealogy.

First we engaged our GPS as these towns are so small they do not show up on ordinary roadmaps. The GPS took us down a reasonable fast road for about 40 KM then turned us onto a number of roads that were no wider than a car and towns that were smaller than 1 km. eventually we arrived at the church where the birth and weddings were recorded.

There was a funeral mass in progress, a band played, the village was out in force and the local nuns prepared and cleaned up the church. Meanwhile we walked through the cemetery and made a great find. Grave stones for the Chudy family dating from 1780 to the 1875. we now know that the Chudy’s have and still live there.

As the funeral wound down they made a procession down the road. As the priest came back to the church we stopped and chatted, we in English and German and he in Czech with a few words in English. We showed him our documents and he told us he was not from the village but knew someone who could help. He took us to the crowd on mourners who were still gathered and introduced us to a Mr. Petr Chudy. We showed our documents and he called over some more Chudy’s.

He then noticed that Ludmila Chudy lived at house # 12. he took us to the house which is still occupied by a chuddy family. They then found someone who spoke English and was able to translate. To make a long story short no one knew of our ancestor but with a village so small we concluded that we were all related somehow. We gathered contact information and gave out thanks and moved on to our next adventure.

Lednice,

The Lendice became the Lichtenstein Summer Castel in the 17th Century.