Discovering Liberec

Group photo of all the IYF participants

Having discovered many cities in the Czech Republic during the last two weeks, the time has now come to get to know Liberec in our small groups. Of course, it took us some time to get off the campus we were staying at, but finally, every group was in the city.

Each small group got a set of tasks to complete by the end of the day. They were mostly concentrating on history, famous people, historical sites, and modern attractions city has to offer. Luckily, we had two Czech girls in our team, but completing the tasks was not easy even with them. At least the weather was a bit less hot than the previous days.

My small group discovering Liberec

My group completed the tasks in a few hours, and among them were: finding out which famous person went to a high school in Liberec (it was car constructor Ferdinand Porsche), finding out when the city hall was built, finding out original location of a certain tower on the town museum and so on. The woman at the museum was not at all happy when two or three small groups stormed in to ask about the tower. Probably because she didn't know the answer.

The Liberec discovery trip ended in a best possible way. We climbed up to Ještěd, the 1,012 meters high mountain peak near Liberec. Of course we didn't climb by foot the whole time, we used the cable car, which was a bigger challenge for some of us than walking.  But everyone survived and a few minutes of fear certainly paid off when we saw the view from the top. The Czech Republic then looked like a country from one of the Grimm brothers' fairytales.

Everyone put their Atlantic Bridge T-shirts on and John took a group photo of all the participants. We finished this amazing day off with dinner in the 94 meter-tall tower on top of the mountain.

View from the top of Ještěd mountain

Photos by Jirina Cancikova