castles and hiking and monasteries, oh my

This weekend we went on a NYU-sponsored (read: "paid for") trip to Western Bohemia, another area of the Czech Republic. We went to Karlovy Vary, a spa town, and Loket, a town with a historic castle, among other places, and in theory, this should have been a great trip, but our tour guide was a bit of a dictator. He didn't believe in sticking to the planned itinerary (a.k.a the reason I woke up at 7 a.m. on a Friday morning to sign up for this trip) so there was a lot of hiking, because this trip was clearly about what he wanted to do. One of the first things he saw was my favorite though. We hiked up this mountain to see the ruins of this old castle, and that was pretty exciting (minus the couple falls I took at the end, of course).


We hiked up the mountain to see the ruins at the top (mostly obscured by fog here)


Ruins


The view.

I'll post more photos later, but if I don't get around to it, there will definitely be an update about our upcoming trip to Budapest.