{"id":818,"date":"2012-07-02T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T08:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=818"},"modified":"2012-11-01T13:59:05","modified_gmt":"2012-11-01T12:59:05","slug":"the-bouda-and-my-arch-enemy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=818","title":{"rendered":"The Bouda and My Arch-Enemy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Our<\/a>I seem to have a love hate relationship with inanimate objects. I have shoes that constantly reform themselves into implements of pedal torture. I have a pillow whose three feathers tickle my nostrils every night and a schizophrenic shower head which was clearly a Gestapo torture expert in a former life.<\/p>\n

So, as I prepare to go to the Krkono\u0161e Mountains for a holiday\/English course it promises a reprieve from these little immobile monsters. Aside from that, a week at a mountain chalet, Moravsk\u00e1 Bouda, teaching English and hiking acts as a meditative retreat from my daily life. The air is cool and clean; it is void of cars, trams, and (most importantly) questions like this: \u201cHow can you me fail Professor Damieleone, me you never saw?\u201d<\/p>\n

A week at Moravsk\u00e1 Bouda means games, walks and drinking Becherovka with Papa Honza (see Thurs blog: Papa Yoda). I will forever remember it both as the place that gets eaten up by clouds and the place I met President Klaus. We hike to the Pramen Labe (the spring of the Elbe River), which at points is like traipsing through the rocky corridors of Mordor.<\/p>\n

It is also the place of my yearly meeting with M\u016fj star\u00fd nep\u0159\u00edtel – My Old Enemy – Sn\u011b\u017eka.<\/p>\n

At 5,256 feet, Sn\u011b\u017eka is the highest peak in the Czech Republic and gripe though I do about her, every time I go to the Krkono\u0161e Mountains, I walk up her. Sn\u011b\u017eka\u2019s primary transgression is that she is up. And in most cases, up is my least favorite preposition.<\/p>\n

Every approach to her is essentially the same. After climbing foot by foot out of a long heavily wooded valley, we walk along a vast plain, thankful for a flat expanse and no slippery rocks. And then, in the distance, she rears her head like one of Earth\u2019s prolapsed hemorrhoids. From there, everyone in the party gears up for the painful climb up that hemorrhoid; and we are given no pretense of ease since she appears be vaulting violently out of the ground.<\/p>\n

Though I have done the climb itself about ten times, I cannot recall one of those times. I have come to the conclusion that I go into some sort of stress-induced torpor which allows me to reach the top without bludgeoning a fit teenager with a rock or kicking a walking stick out from under an old man. At the top, there are usually about 3,203 people speaking Polish, German or Czech. There is a post office (what a route to have, eh?), and there is a small shop in which you can grab your ankles, bend over and buy a small chocolate ice-cream bar for 90K\u010d ($4.50).<\/p>\n

From the onset of the week in the mountains, I will maintain not only my disinterest in going up Sn\u011b\u017eka, but will offer a verbose regimen of refusals to do so. Still, as the group sets out in the early morning on the 24 Km hike, I am always there with stuffing my lunch into my rucksack, rubbing sun screen onto my nose and saying something like, \u201cEh, what the hell. Haven\u2019t seen the old bitch in a year; wonder if she\u2019s changed much.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we get to the top of her, when I am overwhelmed by a creeping feeling of accomplishment it starts raining and I raise my fist and (to the terror of my comrades) shout, \u201cDamn you, M\u016fj star\u00fd nep\u0159\u00edtel!\u201d Damn you, my old enemy! Then we walk the 12 Km home.<\/p>\n

And when we get back to the Bouda that night, sweaty, dirty, tired, aching and more deserving of a beer than at any other time in the history of the world, I guess I know just why I did it again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I seem to have a love hate relationship with inanimate objects. I have shoes that constantly reform themselves into implements of pedal torture. I have a pillow whose three feathers tickle my nostrils every night and a schizophrenic shower head which was clearly a Gestapo torture expert in a former life. So, as I prepare […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-dc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1036,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions\/1036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}