We spent this weekend in a nice village called Raspenava, in the north of Czech Republic, near the Polish border. As this sign indicates, Raspenava is only two kilometers from a village called Peklo, which unambiguously means ‘hell’ in Czech. So there it is: the road to hell.
We actually considered going because there’s a swimming pool in Peklo– you can see the icon for swimming on the sign here. However, I worried that it might be the swimming-in-lake-of-fiery-torment version and decided not to take any chances. If the icon had been printed in red, that would have been a definite giveaway…
Not swimming was probably not a bad idea considering some of the industrial surprises that have cropped up in Eastern Europe. Incidentally, there is a town in Poland called Hel–on the tip of the spit into the Baltic near Gdansk. So you can go to hell multilingually.