After a lovely time in Prague, taking Babi's lead we took the popular busline Student Agency to the next largest city in Czech- Brno, where we made plans to explore a little of the center of the city (we stayed in a hotel nearby), and visit with our extended Czech family that live in Brno.
At a cool train restaurant, the train would bring us our lunch and drinks after ordering.
My cousin Simca's husband- Peter, picked us up at our Brno hotel and brought us to their house for some fun and dinner. The kids played all afternoon while the adults caught up!
The following morning, Babi took a morning bus back to her house in Brezova, while the boys and I continued on to spend the weekend with my other cousin who lives in a rural small town in the countryside outside of Brno. Her husband came to pick us up, and we spent the night over there. It was nice for the boys to reconnect with these cousins, whom they met for the first time last summer. They were able to see Hodejice (a cute little farm town that I remember frequenting when I was a child and visited with my cousins... it brought back so many childhood Czech summer memories!) The boys loved playing in their newly designed backyard, trampoline, we BBQd, and also visited a medieval festival in a nearby town (Slavkov) in which they reacted a Napolean battlefield.
Late Sunday, at the end of the weekend, Babi and Deda came to retrieve us and bring us back to their home in Brezova. Along the way, we stopped at Verka's house to visit and have dinner.
We didn't have 3 weeks to spend at Babi and Deda's this time around... because we plugged in a Spain Trip at the end with daddy. So the next few short but sweet days in Brezova were filled with lots of zoo time, and unfortunately Taji got sick so he had to rest one day with Babi while Deda and I took Jax to the zoo. Once Taji felt better, we promised we would go back to the zoo with him. So Jax was lucky to have 2 zoo days and our favorite zoo in the world!
We discovered one of my longtime Czech friends (who lives in CA) was visiting her family in Czech too and planning to visit the zoo the same day, so we had a very special reunion! What are the chances we would meet up thousands of miles away, in the same place of our heritage?!! I have known Dianka since we were kids, and now that we have our own kids, we both believe in forming that connection with the Czech culture and she regularly takes her little girl back to Czech for the summers. I aspire to the same for the boys and since our relatives live so close to each other, one of these times we plan to plan something together! I am grateful for this one-of-kind special friendship! Its not every day you have a friend you've known your whole life, who is from the same culture, and we have so much in common, - its nice and refreshing to be able to identify with her in a world where Czechs are a minority!
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