It's raining in Brno.
Again.
As it does every day.
OK, saying that it rains every day in Brno wouldn't exactly be a true statement. A more truthful statement would be that in Brno, water falls from the sky at some point during the day on approximately 84.4% days out of the year.
A quick Google search will most likely return a completely different statistic; but I can absolutely assure you that my statistic is correct.
Here is how I arrived at that number:
This summer, for family reasons, I decided to leave Prague, my home for the previous seven and a half years, and move to Brno. For those of you who might need to brush up on your Central European geography, Brno is the second-largest city in the Czech Republic and capital of Moravia, a historical region in the Eastern part of the Czech Republic.
Despite its unsettling lack of vowels, Brno has a lot to offer. Not only are there plenty of work opportunities for those of us in the education racket, Brno isn't exactly a village and there are plenty of things to do.
(That being said, people from Prague do refer to Brno as 'The Biggest Village in Europe'.)
With 400,000 people, Brno is filled with restaurants, bars, cafés, shops, and everything else that city folk like me need to survive. I've even found the Vietnamese market where we can get all those fancy Asian ingredients which are sadly unavailable in normal Czech grocery stores.
So far, I've really enjoyed living in and exploring Brno. It's exciting to find new places to eat and drink. Sure, the cuisine is so pork-heavy that bar mitzvahs have to be held in Vienna , there are also an exciting number of interesting restaurants offering all kinds of cuisines, including an inordinately large number of Indian restaurants.
And of course, that doesn't even count the places to drink, and when I compare them to Prague, drink cheaply. In a little over a month, I've had beers for 21 crowns, shots of herbal liquor for 19 crowns, and one of the finest Martinis I've ever had in Europe at a fabulous cocktail bar for a wallet-breaking 90 crowns. If you don't happen to live in the Czech Republic, hop on over to XE and see how much that is in your home currency. Feel free to come back after you recover from the shock.
Besides the stuff that's always here, there always seems to be something going on. I've already attended a harvest festival, a beer festival, and even a chilli festival (more on that another time). Next weekend there's a food festival, the wine festival is the week after that, and so on in that manner.
In fact, there has been one downside, and one downside only, to my relocation to Brno.
It rains here. Almost every day. 84.4% of the days, to be exact.
You see, I've now lived in Brno for 32 days. It has rained, at some point during the day, on 27 of those days. A little calcumathing is all it takes to arrive at 84.4%.
Sure, some people might say that it has been an exceptionally rainy August and September in the entire country, not just Brno, and that my little calculation flies in the face of any and all sound mathematical principles.
But little things like 'facts' won't stop me from coming to my own conclusions, oh no.
After all, as I write this sentence, it is currently pouring down with rain.
Because it always rains in Brno.
Again.
As it does every day.
OK, saying that it rains every day in Brno wouldn't exactly be a true statement. A more truthful statement would be that in Brno, water falls from the sky at some point during the day on approximately 84.4% days out of the year.
A quick Google search will most likely return a completely different statistic; but I can absolutely assure you that my statistic is correct.
Here is how I arrived at that number:
This summer, for family reasons, I decided to leave Prague, my home for the previous seven and a half years, and move to Brno. For those of you who might need to brush up on your Central European geography, Brno is the second-largest city in the Czech Republic and capital of Moravia, a historical region in the Eastern part of the Czech Republic.
Despite its unsettling lack of vowels, Brno has a lot to offer. Not only are there plenty of work opportunities for those of us in the education racket, Brno isn't exactly a village and there are plenty of things to do.
(That being said, people from Prague do refer to Brno as 'The Biggest Village in Europe'.)
With 400,000 people, Brno is filled with restaurants, bars, cafés, shops, and everything else that city folk like me need to survive. I've even found the Vietnamese market where we can get all those fancy Asian ingredients which are sadly unavailable in normal Czech grocery stores.
So far, I've really enjoyed living in and exploring Brno. It's exciting to find new places to eat and drink. Sure, the cuisine is so pork-heavy that bar mitzvahs have to be held in Vienna , there are also an exciting number of interesting restaurants offering all kinds of cuisines, including an inordinately large number of Indian restaurants.
And of course, that doesn't even count the places to drink, and when I compare them to Prague, drink cheaply. In a little over a month, I've had beers for 21 crowns, shots of herbal liquor for 19 crowns, and one of the finest Martinis I've ever had in Europe at a fabulous cocktail bar for a wallet-breaking 90 crowns. If you don't happen to live in the Czech Republic, hop on over to XE and see how much that is in your home currency. Feel free to come back after you recover from the shock.
Besides the stuff that's always here, there always seems to be something going on. I've already attended a harvest festival, a beer festival, and even a chilli festival (more on that another time). Next weekend there's a food festival, the wine festival is the week after that, and so on in that manner.
In fact, there has been one downside, and one downside only, to my relocation to Brno.
It rains here. Almost every day. 84.4% of the days, to be exact.
You see, I've now lived in Brno for 32 days. It has rained, at some point during the day, on 27 of those days. A little calcumathing is all it takes to arrive at 84.4%.
Sure, some people might say that it has been an exceptionally rainy August and September in the entire country, not just Brno, and that my little calculation flies in the face of any and all sound mathematical principles.
But little things like 'facts' won't stop me from coming to my own conclusions, oh no.
After all, as I write this sentence, it is currently pouring down with rain.
Because it always rains in Brno.