The new house in Stará Oleška

The new house © Ricky Yates

 

As I’ve explained in my two previous blog posts, here and here, and in responding to comments on them, I’ve been looking to buy a house into which to retire, in the vicinity of the north Bohemian town of Decín. This is the promised update.

On Thursday 9th March, I went to view this house, along with Martin Tonder of Vesta Realitní. Having overnight pondered on what I saw, the next day, I sent off an email with an offer to buy. By the morning of Tuesday 14th March, my offer had been accepted 🙂

After a few days delay, I’ve now received translations into English of two documents for me and the current . . . → Read More: The new house in Stará Oleška

Decín

Decín on the Labe river with the Zámek/Château on the right © Ricky Yates

Decín is a town that lies either side of the Labe (Czech), Elbe (German), river. It is situated at the beginning of a deep gorge where the Labe cuts through the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, Labské pískovce (Czech), Elbsandsteingebirge (German), on its way to Dresden in Germany and eventually flowing into the North Sea beyond Hamburg. The area to the east of the Labe is known as Bohemian Switzerland, Ceské Švýcarsko (Czech), Böhmische Schweiz (German), about which I’ve written previously here on my blog.

Decín is 130km north-west of Prague and takes around one-and-a-half hours to reach by either road or rail. But its closeness to the German border means that it only takes forty-five minutes by train to get to Dresden. . . . → Read More: Decín

From Winter into Spring

After a very cold and snowy winter, as I explained in my eighth blog anniversary post, in the last couple of weeks, Winter has slowly begun to recede and Spring is arriving. Therefore, it is certainly time to get my blog out of hibernation, being very aware that I haven’t posted anything here for a month.

There are numerous events that I could write about but here are just three highlights from the last couple of weeks.

My birthday burger © Ricky Yates

Birthday

On Sunday 26th February, I celebrated my sixty-fifth birthday. This is the second time since moving to Prague, that my birthday has fallen on a Sunday. The last time was on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday in 2012 which was also a . . . → Read More: From Winter into Spring

Why adding the letter ‘y’ is so funny

Hot dogy anyone? 🙂 © Ricky Yates

Right from the beginning of my time spent living and working in the Czech Republic, one of the things that has constantly amused me, is seeing an English word on a shop, an advertising hoarding, or in a menu, with the letter ‘y’ added to the end of the word. For example – a sports shop advertising that it sells ‘Snowboardy’ and ‘Skateboardy’.

There is a simple explanation as to why this occurs – adding the letter ‘y’ to the end of a noun, is the most common way in Czech, to make a word plural. It is the virtual equivalent of adding the letter ‘s’ in English, so that ‘snowboard’, becomes ‘snowboards’.

However, very few of even the most fluent English-speaking Czechs, understand why ‘snowboardy’ and . . . → Read More: Why adding the letter ‘y’ is so funny

Happy eighth birthday to my blog

Kostel sv. Mikuláse in Malá Strana © Ricky Yates

Tomorrow, Saturday 4th February 2017, marks a significant anniversary – it is exactly eight years since I wrote and posted my first-ever blog post here on ‘Ricky Yates – an Anglican in Prague’. Yes – eight years on, I’m still blogging 🙂

Believe it or not, this is post number 375. But I have to confess that in the past year, I’ve only managed to add 33 posts since celebrating the blog’s seventh birthday, a year ago. Therefore it sadly ranks as my least productive year 🙁 However, I am proud that if you scroll down the right-hand side bar to ‘Archives’, you will see that in each of the 96 months since I started writing, I have managed at least one post in every single one . . . → Read More: Happy eighth birthday to my blog