It was essentially a weekend getaway in a fancier hotel than we would usually go to.
Karlovy Vary is a funny place. There are SO MANY RUSSIAN PEOPLE. December is definitely not high season, but still we heard more Russian in the streets than any other language (even Czech - I swear!).
We left Friday after Olek's classes. I had gotten us Chinese takeout to eat in the car (CLASSY! But I was really craving Chinese) and when I met Olek at his uni, I realised I had forgotten to take forks So we had to stop at a supermarket and get plastic forks. Worst 10 minutes of my life (ok.. close!) - having the food on my lap and being unable to eat it.
Olek had chosen a route through the mountains so we wouldn't have to pay for the Czech highway. The higher up we were the more it snowed (duh!)

(I know you can't really see anything, but neither did we! This is the border)
It was a bit of an adventure, but we made it safely.
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Once we arrived and had checked into our hotel Olek surprised me with champagne from Crimea (-we went there last year-) and a box of after eight chocolate (and he hates mint chocolate!). And then we went for a walk around town and Czech beer:

(I have new glasses!)

On Saturday we basically just walked around Karlovy Vary and relaxed in our hotel room (I was slightly hung over But in CZ they have PINK iboprofenum, which makes it 100 times cooler).
Some Russian lady took a photo of us

We bought warm wafers (apparently typical for Karlovy Vary - who knew?) and I was attacked by pigeons:

(birds terrify me. Especially pigeons)
And we drank lots of weird tasting, hot mineral water (there are hot springs, so there are a lot of public "taps" where you can get about 60C hot water) from funny looking mugs:

It was also really cold and snowing A LOT:




Today we went to a spa and spent an hour in a huge hot tub/bath tub, which was pretty neat:


in front of the spa:


We walked around the town some more, tried to ride a furnicular that turned out to be closed, bought souvenirs and when we got back to our car the Karlovy Vary city police taught us that in the Czech Republic it's illegal to park against the direction of traffic (which it isn't in Poland, where we both got our licenses we had no idea). A lesson that cost us 500CK (~20€). And then we went back home. This time it wasn't snowing, so it was a lot faster.