Days 118-119: Brno

My time in Brno is wrapping up, so I suppose I should give an account of what I've been up to. I switched to my original hostel mostly uneventfully and spent yesterday checking out the town. Brno is a nice city, and if I had come here directly from Canada I probably would have been dazzled, but after visiting all the other famous cities recently Brno mostly just seems like another city. There were a few interesting things going on around town. The main square had a bunch of sand sculptures from a recent contest, and there was a small music festival going on in a nearby park. The main shopping street is nice, but most things were closed for the weekend.

There are a few interesting churches. One of them has underground catacombs full of mummified monks, but they wanted more money for an entrance fee than I was willing to spend. The same church also has this cheeky fellow greeting you at one of the entrances.

The most noteworthy part of this stretch has probably been the people in the hostel. It is run by two guys from Spain and Italy, but they only come by for a few hours each day to check people in and wash the linens, so most of the time we're on our own. It's a small hostel, with only 10 beds total, and last night there was me, a Spanish biology student that is working on a graduate research project with some Czechs which requires him to travel back and forth to the city, and a group of 6 Slovenian scouts. By scouts, I mean like boy scouts, although 4 of them were female and they were between the ages of 16 and 20. They were a lively bunch and as part of their scouting rules weren't allowed to drink alchohol or coffee, smoke, or buy food (they were supposed to make all their own meals). They were adamant in sharing their dinner with us, which turned out to be something very similar to porridge, but we all had a nice long chat.

During my discussions with the Spaniard we found we had a mutual interest in genetics, and he told me that Brno is the city which Gregor Mendel lived, experimented and presented his findings in. A few of you may not know who Gregor Mendel is (shame on you!), but he was a monk who is widely considered the father of genetics for his studies on heredity in pea plants. At the time, people didn't recognize the importance of his research and conclusions, but as the field progressed his work was rediscovered years later, showing just how much of a pioneer he was.

This morning I wandered over to St Thomase Abbey where Mendel was a friar and later abbot, and found that they actually have a museum dedicated to Mendel and to genetics inside part of the building. I can't imagine there are too many genetics museums inside abbeys around. The museum was small, but had an incredibly amount of information (with english translations, phew). The actual plot where Mendel experimented on peas is still around (although with flowers now), and among Mendel's possessions on display is his personal copy of Darwin's Origin of Species with Mendel's notes and highlighted passages. Now -that- is a book that would be priceless.

I'm hopefully taking an early train to Krakow tomorrow so that I don't get in too late.