It's a miserable Olomouc Sunday. For much of the day the dreary rain has fallen on and off and the city has stayed quietly snoozy: without a flat to complete, dogs to walk or imagination to use then most likely it would have been a day spent in bed, doing the lazy beddish things like reading and watching the sort of films rainy Sundays permit. However, in the pursuit of final box clearing, picture hanging and bookshelf sorting much tea has been consumed – perhaps too much. By lunchtime the only thing on offer would be fruit juice or green tea. Or black coffee. Or wine. There is, therefore, only one option for the unashamed tea drinker and that is to search far and wide for something called a 'shop'.
Olomouc shops are peculiar creatures. During the week they operate in much the same way all others operate – people come in, buy stuff and leave. But for much of Saturday and Sunday they completely cease operations and remain firmly shut. If you're lucky you may find someone willing to open on a Saturday morning, but in most other cases the shopkeepers of this lush Haná region disavow weekend spending – even on their turf! It seems that here cash is not the God of all things. It's not that people don't want to go shopping: the large supermarkets are always open and mint it.
Senimo our nearest supermarket, however, is rubbish. This is probably because it used to be an abattoir – eek! The old building actually started life in 1898 as an auction hall but functioned within the meat industry from the 1930s until the 80s. Shortly after the Velvet Revolution the local agricultural cooperative bought the building, carefully restored it and to popular acclaim re-opened it as Olomouc's very first supermarket on the premise that anything is be better than nothing. It compares poorly with the Satanic Tescos and its Dutch cousin Albert, but at least you can buy an industrial-sized bag of bay leaves should the need arise.
By the time we'd walked the dogs round by the river, the store had unsurprisingly shut leaving but one option – the milk vending machine outside. This is not a device that merely drops litre packs conveniently into your waiting hand, oh no. This Italian made contraption pours – yes pours – its milk and you'd better be ready with your bottle.
There is one other popular vending machine in the town hall that dispenses the famously stinky and curiously addictive Olomouc cheese (below) – nom, nom, nom...
We'd brought an empty bottle with us (what – don't you bring empty milk bottles on walks?), put it in the steam-cleaned aperture and promptly dropped our only 50 koruna piece (about £1.67) into the machine, selected the larger of the two options (1 litre) and within seconds the ice cold milk was pouring into and all over the bottle. Great! But there was a problem (there's always a problem): no change. Seeing our remaining 30-something koruna blinking on the LED display we felt that 50 was a lot to pay for just one litre so looked around for something, anything, to put the rest in. We had a roll of poo bags.
The doggy poo bags are notoriously thin and wispish. They don't break in use, but may split in the unreeling just before picking up the dog choc drops. Being upstanding citizens with three twice-daily doggies we always clear up and usually carry one or two with us – just in case. And here was another just in case moment, although it hadn't ever crossed our mind that these polyethyline sacks could ever be utilized to fetch litres of milky goodness. Nevertheless, beneath the benign bovine on Pasteurova (honestly, that's the name of the street – he would have been proud) we managed to fill a further three bags full, leaving only 6 koruna in the machine, and proudly carried the trophy milk home to fill the freezer.
And they say the sense of adventure is dead!
So glad to hear you didn't waste your milk.....
Reminds me of the first time I went to the States - a fellow vagabond informed us about a rather cranky Coke machine around the corner. Apparently, if you greased two nickels and put them in you could occasionally get two cans for the price of one.
In the interests of scientific research we did just that.
It worked a a treat - and then, one by one, out came the other 50 odd cans....
Posted by: Angus | 08/26/2013 at 02:26 AM
Or the time somebody removed the lock on cash drawer of the college's payphone – that was a looong phone call to the Memsahib for 10p
Posted by: Richard Peters | 08/26/2013 at 02:36 PM