A Day at the Cottage

It was a lovely, near perfect day at the cottage.  Now, the thing is, I normally don’t enjoy going to the cottage much.  Oh, I like my in-laws, but there’s no communication between us.  They don’t speak English, and they don’t go out of their way to communicate with me in Czech, either.  As often as not, conversations are conducted with my wife as translator.  The cottage is in a lovely region, but often everybody just stays in and watches TV.  So, I get bored.
But today we had to move a huge pile of dirt from the front yard, and make a pile of it in back of the house, inside the chicken’s pen.  So, that was a couple of hours of good, strenuous outdoor work.  If I did that on a more regular basis, I’d actually be losing weight.  And, it was a perfect day for it.  Cloudy, so not too hot, but everything is in bloom and it is a very lush region.
Lunch was a cabbage soup, with bits of sausage in it, and a dish that I will transliterate  as chevabchitzi, which is ground beef, but sausage shaped.
After lunch, we went to look at a house, because I often talk about setting up an English School in the country, and Kotelsko is a small enough village to count as country.  I was actually kind of hoping I’d find some glaring flaws, because setting up shop directly across the street from my wife’s parents, while it would have some advantages (assistance with routine repairs, extra accommodation for overflow guests), is not my dream situation.  But, it was actually kind of perfect.  So, we’ll see.  We can’t actually afford it, but we may give it a go anyway.
Then, we took a walk up the hill, saw how what used to be a sheep meadow has been transformed into a honey farm, and got a great view of the hills and forests all around, and Trosky (which means ruins, and they are), two towers of a castle on the highest mountain in the area, quite impressive, around 12th century I think.
Then we came home, which pleased me, because normally Helena wants to stay just as long as she can, and we get back late at night.  But, we were home plenty early, watched a movie (Patch Adams, which I’d never seen before.  Quite a beautiful piece of work.)
And that was my day.