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Where Czech Locals Go For Summer Vacation?!
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Jul 13, 2025
Skip Prague and enjoy more local experience - visit Mácháč! Lake Mácha is just 90 minute drive from Prague. For more travel tips, check out the official Instagram account of the place here: https://www.instagram.com/machuvkraj/ Get SECRET MAPS & TIPS for Prague here http://patreon.com/honestguide Honest Guide https://instagram.com/realhonestguide Janek https://instagram.com/janekrubes/ Honza https://instagram.com/honzamikulka/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/HonestPragueGuide/ The music we use for our videos https://bit.ly/HonestMusic Get creative assets for your videos https://bit.ly/HonestFilmmakersAssets 0:00 Where Locals Actually Go To? 0:37 Miloš Forman Lookout Spot 1:46 Ruins of Jestřebí Castle 3:00 Abandoned houses in Ploužnice 4:23 Abandoned Airport Hradčany 5:24 Mácha Lake
View Video Transcript
0:00
Ty krása, put this on the list of places I've never been to alone
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Most likely you're going to visit Czech Republic and you're going to go to Prague
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and you're going to want to see places like the Charles Bridge or the Astronomical Clock
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Well, guess what? Locals don't really care about those. If there's one place locals go to in the summer in the Czech Republic, it's right here
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This, ladies and gentlemen, is Máháč and it's a cool spot that we're going to introduce to you
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This is a lookout spot that is named after a person I bet you know Miloš Forman, Oscar
0:43
award winning director, director of Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest and many other films
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And the reason this lookout has his name is that his parents were actually one of the pioneers
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of tourism at this lake because they bought one of the first properties and opened the first
1:00
bed and breakfast here on the lake and to this day you can actually sleep there. It's still
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family-owned, it's still Forman family-owned and the pension is called Rut and you will have a nice
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lookout over the lake. By the way, the tip for the bed and breakfast we got from another Czech
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director, not an Oscar winner, but an Oscar nominee, Jan Hřebek, author of some amazing
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Czech films that you can find on Netflix. And if you can't reach them from US, just use a VPN
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And nearby, you can play this giant battleship game that we used to play as kids on a piece of
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paper with a pen or a pencil. Well, here you play it with whatever the forest gives you
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Just a three-minute drive from the lake, we came to this ruin of a castle from the 13th, 14th century
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when you climb up, you're actually climbing through an old well. Back in the days, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of years ago
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they would have wooden staircases to get up to the castle, and they would actually take them apart if danger was coming
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Other interesting fact I found out about this castle, or the ruins, is that as it was slowly falling apart in the 18th century
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the villagers from the village surrounding it would take the stones and the bricks
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and use it to build their own houses. So as I was looking around the houses, which one would resemble something like a castle
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I couldn't spot anything except for the kids' playground. That does look like a castle, but not built from the rocks from 12th century
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And right under the castle in the village is a pub called Under the Castle
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Obviously, they have beer and some great food, I'm sure, but also they have ice cream
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So I get the small one, Hansa the big one. delicious by the way We are next to a town called Memogni and to you these may be just some empty buildings
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but to us this is a piece of history of our country. In 1968 we were occupied by the Soviet
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army and when they came, a lot of soldiers came, I mean hundreds of thousands, they had to live
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somewhere. So they build these apartment blocks and then they left in 1991 and they left everything
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behind including these houses. Everything that could be stolen was stolen. Everything that
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could be broken was broken and we were left with this. Some of the apartment blocks were recently
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reconstructed so people live in them again but most of it was just left I guess to rust and to
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eventually fall apart. So we walked through some of them and it's pretty impressive. We've
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experienced something similar with Honza when we visited the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl
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and the city attached to it, which is Pripyat, where, you know, it looks kind of similar
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just trees growing through buildings. But this is much closer to our homes and
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it's kind of cool to just walk around. Just please be safe
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And if you wonder why so many soldiers moved to this specific location
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what brought them there? Well the answer is quite simple, an airfield
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As you can tell airfield no longer being used for airplanes but mainly for cars because
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car tuning shows happen here quite frequently and on the weekdays people go inline skating here
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and it really is something impressive to stand here because usually you see a runway from a
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window of plane and you're on the big plane on the runway so the size comparison is different than
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when you stand in the middle of a runway as a person and suddenly you see how huge it is
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three kilometers wow love it Alonso is that small Maybe you weren't expecting to see this kind of thing in today's video, but there you go
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We like it. Hopefully you will as well. From the airport, we drove back to the city of Dox, but if we would want to be inspired by the famous Czech poet
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we would walk. He used to walk a lot and he actually wrote a very famous poem right here in the town of Doxie
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and we would like to present you that poem, but I'm not going to do it. They have a local artist that actually does it
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So you just call the number, he'll show up, and he'll present the poem
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So let me ring him. Hi. Yeah, you got a minute? Yeah, just show up
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Right, sweet. He speaks English, by the way. Cool, cool. Yeah, we'll wait. It was late evening of the 1st of May and the rest I have no idea how it in English sorry But yeah this famous poem was written right here in Doxi
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Maha, the famous poet, gave name not only to this beautiful lake, but also to the entire beautiful region surrounding it
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Machu v Kraj, check out their Instagram, it's stunning, especially when the sun is out, that's why we're filming here right now
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Also, I talked to my auntie Wikipedia and she gave me some fun facts regarding this lake
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Believe it or not, it is not a lake. It's a fish pond. And the name Maha became or established in the 60s
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Before that, it was called just a big pond. By the way, the largest pond in our country, if you exclude the region of the big ponds in the south region of our country
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Average depth is 2.2 meters. That's another fun fact. I learned from Wikipedia. This is the beautiful castle in the city of Dokce, right next to the
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lake. And inside of it is something very important for our history. And that is the museum of
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Cztyřlíštek. Cztyřlíštek, the four leaf or the clover leaf. It is the most famous Czech cartoon
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It's more famous than the Simpsons or the South Park, and it's much nicer and family friendly
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So if you guys want to meet the heroes of our childhood, you definitely want to come here
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I believe your kids will love it. You can go through the pages. It is only in Czech, but come on, Google Translate will help you with the ideas of what's going on
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And the reason it is here is because the author actually lived nearby and he was inspired by the region
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Just to give you an idea how important and historical this cartoon is
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The author, Mr. Njemeček, has been hand drawing it by himself for 55 years
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Hats off. And if you're not into cartoons but more into the history
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just one floor below the cartoon museum is the historical part of this castle that is being renovated
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By the way, above us is the actual cartoon museum. Right now there's 30 kids and you can see the chandelier moving as they're jumping up and down
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Most of the castles that you go to that are from the 15th century usually you cannot touch or sit on the different objects
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Well this case is different because these are replicas of the originals
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So if you come here they will let you touch and sit on whatever you like and take a picture just like you're you know one of the royals
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I was actually looking forward to get some junk food from the stands around the lake here
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You know like the traditional Prague pizza that we call langos. but most of the stands were closed. So we ended up in some really nice restaurants actually. Skripek
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and the Hotel Port. Very delicious and we also had a great coffee and Honza had a cake on the square
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in the city. And finally since we were still hungry we got a tip from the locals for a bistro
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Tip to get some food here in Doxi we got from the locals to go to this bistro Unfortunately in mid they still in like a winter regime That means they only serve ice cream so i got a small one and honza got the large one uh just to give you an
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idea that's 45 crowns uh large it's massive so luckily we do not need to eat their food that
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we saw in the pictures no we we're not looking forward to that we can just enjoy their ice cream
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Ice cream is delicious, man. Always better than normal food. Topestadce je awesome
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How awesome is it to be an adult? Instead of a regular food, you can get ice cream
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Like, kids, they must be so jealous right now. The area here around the lake is like our summer vacations in the 90s
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That's what most people will think of when you say machac. And just recently, somebody used that narrative in a movie that we just recently discovered with Honza
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that is called Party Harder, Summer Massacre. And it takes place in these cottages here
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They live in these cottages. They go party in the nearby disco that has the 90s vibe
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The film, the movie, is hilarious. It is on Netflix, so go watch it if you want to see something really nasty and dirty
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Please, it's like minimum age 25 to watch that film. I hope you will love it. It's like super bad but much much better. So go watch it and after watching it you're gonna want to come here to party to one of the discos
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Excuse me, do you guys know if there's any place that serves Coca-Cola? I'm looking for a place that serves Coca-Cola. No? Thanks
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now let's not sugarcoat the area here yes you will find some absolute bizarre and horrible
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and very bad rated places but some great places are popping up and are getting ready for the
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season right now that place looks really good by the way and we were told it's a cool spot
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so if you decide to come in the summer to your toes in the lovely lake you should do so it really
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is close to Prague. We created this video to lure you into this region together with the region of
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Liberec, region named after a city of Liberec, which we will hopefully visit in some future
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episodes because it is actually one of our favorite cities in our country. So subscribe
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stay tuned and you may see it on one of the future episodes. These were the honest guides
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Honza behind the camera, Janek in front of it, showing you Machač. See you next week
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and this time I'm going to teach you how to say lake in Czech because that behind me
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is called a lake and that is jezero. Jezero is lake but in fact the thing behind me is actually
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a large pond which would be rybník. Rybník is pond, fish pond because ryba is a fish so rybník
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is fish pond. A big ass airfield that is now empty so we can go crazy with my car on it
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Unfortunately I drive a diesel station wagon
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