Brno; Monday, 29 July, 2013

Even with the fan going at full blast and the window wide open it made no difference and sleep didn’t come. After hearing someone else doing it elsewhere in the building around 2am I had a nice cool shower to see if that would have any effect, but the fact that I dried off within about two minutes and then was sweating again suggested this was not going to be a night for sleep.

Finally giving up any chance of sleeping around 6am I had another long shower, and early breakfast and then headed out to have a wander around town for the last few hours before it was time to move on again.

Following on from my experience with the labyrinth on Saturday and the Casemates yesterday I headed over to the Mintmasters cellars underneath the new town hall.

Sure enough they were gloriously cool, so I spent rather longer than I would ever thought I would have done staring at 16th Century silver coins minted in Brno. I didn’t take any of the information in, I was more just wanting to drag out the coolness for as long as possible.

Eventually, once I’d been overtaken by people who had entered the museum nearly an hour after I had (and it’s a very small museum), I decided it was perhaps time to face the furnace outside.

I went for a little wander round to the main square and stopped for an early lunch in the shade and whiled away the last hour or so of my time in Brno watching people wander up to the fountain in the square and immerse their heads straight into it in an attempt to cool down.

I collected my luggage from the hotel and wandered over to Brno main station to pick up the rail replacement bus.

The organisation of the buses was pretty good, it’s just a shame the same couldn’t be said about the trains. Whilst the buses got us to the station in time, the train was already 25 minutes late, and with very little shelter it was a pretty warm 25 minute wait.

Eventually the train arrived and I clambered on board to discover my reserved seat was being used as a luggage store for a large family who had the rest of the compartment and made it pretty obvious they weren’t going to be happy having to move all their stuff. It was also apparent that they either didn’t like air-conditioning, or had switched it off. So rather than make a scene I took a seat in the almost empty compartment next door, where the two people already sitting in there had the air-conditioning set as beautifully cold.