You won't fall up and we'll find you at the bottom.

The above is a Czech climbers' saying meant to make you feel safe about the whole climbing bit, and it explains the whole climbing mentality quite nicely. My trip to the Alps was, of course, amazing, despite inclement weather and illness. We started out in Austria, but after several days of climbing rocks in the rain (which is an entirely stupid idea, as rain makes things slippery) we transferred to the Italian Alps, the Dolomiti. The weather there was sunny to the point of tanning, the mountains were bigger and more epic, the parking lots (where we typically slept, being the hoboes that we are) drier, and the community was vibrant, so a good move on all fronts.

One of the more interesting aspects of traveling to foreign countries is the language barrier. It's weird how despite traveling considerably, I'm usually either in English or Slavic speaking countries so I can kinda tell what's going on. Climbing expeditions to Germany and Austria are typically the exception, but since I've been there a lot in past years I've gotten very good at not understanding German. In Italy I was confronted with a completely new type of Foreign, and I'd find myself listening to shop ladies and being like "yes, yes, your language is very sexy, I agree, but I have no idea what you're saying." In addition the climbing community is very international, so typically the Croatians can't understand the Danes, the Germans can't understand the Slovenians, the Italians can't understand anyone and no one speaks English, but everyone wants to say hi to each other. While I can normally distinguish the languages, I feel that subliminally they all kind of register as "Foreign", so I pick a language at random to try to communicate in and it tends to be the wrong one, leaving fellow mountaineers perplexed in the face of my inept attempts at goodwill. Occasionally we would meet fellow Czechs but we'd end up saying hi to them in German or French or something. Kind of a bizarre situation.


A mountain goat! It seems much more at ease among the wet rocks than I was.


The cows seem to regard the approach path as their own personal autobahn. Getting them to move is occasionally tricky. We have fights. They go:
Me: Move.
Cow: Mooo.
Me: Seriously.
Cow: *impassive stare*
Me: Stop staring at me.
Cow: *continues the same*
Me: *violent shove quite out of character for an about-to-be vegetarian*
Cow: Mrf. *slowly saunters off path*


Clouds above the Italian mountains. Much more impressive and breathtaking in real life.


I rather like this picture. Everywhere in Europe the mountains have crosses on them, usually lugged up by some brave soul eighty years ago or so, but oftentimes mountains and mountain huts all over the world have Buddhist prayer flags flapping in the wind as well, which wouldn't seem to make sense since they're dedicated to the Tibetan mountain gods that don't technically reside in Northern Italy, but they don't seem out of place at all and unintentionally two completely different perceptions of the world end up quietly coexisting, both in agreement about the presence of the mountains.

brb...I´m climbing the Alps

If I had an instant messenger in Europe, that would be my away message. Is that not lovely? I shall be away for about two weeks or so, we shall see.

I leave you with quotes from my favourite nerd, Douglas Adams.

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

"Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast."

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."

I must say, this brings back wonderful memories of rainy days in eighth grade.

Allez Bichettez!

My newest bedtime story involves men of steel, hellish treks at breakneck speeds, and drugs. This is because my newest bedtime story is the Tour de France. It's shown on Czech Television 2 every night at eleven after the news commentary, and I enjoy it greatly. Mostly I laze on the couch and go - haha, you have to go up that hill and I don't. Suck it! I am very mature.

The Tour itself is a bastion of proud history and why-the-hell-would-anyone-do-thatness. (Kind of like France. Speaking of stereotypes, I could have had escargot the other day but didn't because I was cheap. Way to broaden my horizons) It started in 1903 and had only six stages (It now has 21), but the stages were ridiculous - 471km, ie. more than 300 miles, in a day, on the type of bike common for 1903. Over a hundred years later, it's as popular as ever, and the traditions of the Tour have become a lore. In the biking world, it's a really big deal - the best cyclists have been known to skip the Olympics because the Tour was that much more important. The course changes every year, and every village it passes through has throngs of people of all ages cheering it on.

The first winner ever. Awesome facial expression much?


The first person to wear the yellow jersey. He doesn't look very happy, but I doubt I would be...


Sweaters, goggles and camaraderie. I kind of love this picture.

P.S. The title is taken from a sign that people used to post on the route of another epic Alpine race. Crude? Maybe. Kind of sick? Very.

Little shop of...horrors?

No indeed, as Atelier Le Boheme makes its custom by being cute and charming. Hence my only job is to be cute and charming (and also fluent in english, which is what landed me said job in the first place). I am pleased to say that I am quite good at being cute and charming for money. However, it was very startling to undress a mannequin only to realize it was, in fact, a male mannequin, perhaps it could be said a VERY male mannequin. If this mannequin had a name, it would be Bruno.I mentioned this to my boss, who shrugged and told me to have it wear a dress anyway. My inner skeptic doubted the wisdom of this plan, since the model had "male definition" and all, but it cannot be said that I didn't try:



After realising that this was perhaps not the correct path of action, I simply grabbed a purple linen shirt and dressed Bruno in that, which posed a problem as well as Bruno has an arse but no legs and thus cannot properly clothe his nether regions. As a result, Bruno looks rather flamboyant. Bear this in mind if you ever meet a headless, legless but indisputably hot bohemian figure in Old Town. His name is Bruno and he would be absolutely delighted, darling, to have a pot of tea with you.

All in all it was just a brick in the wall.

I've been keeping quite busy. I biked some more (140 km to Plzen - my legs hate me), attended a protest that appeared on CNN (in the form of one photo and a caption that said, succintly, "people protested"), and spent inordinate amounts of money on books. I also finally saw a film I've really been rather wanting to see - Pink Floyd's The Wall. I had heard amazing things about it across the generations (and read great individual reviews online -yes, yes I am a nerd, ok?) but had never managed to see it, so I trekked across Prague to a tiny little hole-in-the-wall establishment where it was playing. Two hours later, I stumbled out, trying to remind myself that life isn't so bad and that giant cartoon bugs wouldn't materialize out of thin air and start morphing into other giant cartoon bugs.

This was because The Wall is dark. It's dark, morbid, graphic, and depressing. It's brilliant in its music, which is Pink Floyd at their spacey best, and it's brilliant in its aforementioned cartoon segments, which are really rather good if completely unnerving - think Tim Burtonesque figures on acid minus the happiness plus horrible disfigurement and spacey Floyd in the background. At one point the Woodstock dove explodes into the Big Dark Falcon of Death which turns into a bomber plane and terrorizes a very gray England. Orwell with surround sound. But this was my problem with it. Yes, it's an hour and a half of rather well-done bleakness, but that's just it - a portrait of the world as a horrible place full of war and abandonment and oedipus complexes, and the story of how a little boy turned out to be a psycho because of that - no real hope, no real ok-how-can-we-change-that. I guess if it started being hopeful and optimistic the artistic vision would be compromised, but I personally like my films to have some sort of ray of light somewhere eventually. So in conclusion, The Wall - brilliant film, worth seeing, that I didn't end up liking.

Other pictures of fun Czech awesomeness, no cartoon bugs allowed:

You want peace? I want peace, too! Awesome! Now...uh...what next?

RIOT POLICE: No one goes up the castle steps! We shall guard these steps with the blood of our fathers! YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
LARGE CROWD OF PROTESTERS: uh, well, do you mind if we just go around then and get to the same point?
RIOT POLICE: Yeah, no worries mate.
LARGE CROWD OF PROTESTERS: Well, that's all right then. Cheerio, cap'n.
(I'm exaggerating. The police were very nice and the protest was peaceful and lawful, which was awesome.)

Me, sticking my head out of the window of the train from Plzen to Prague like an overexcited dog. Note: I do not normally look this red, or this distorted. Actually, I barely recognise myself in this picture. Internet anonymity maintained!

Life is grand.

Tour de the area around Prague (a.k.a. my legs hurt)

I didn´t have work yesterday, so I planned a bike trip in the countryside surrounding Prague. It was a very long and hilly affair, but I enjoyed it immensely. I plotted a route on the czech version of mapquest that took me to two castles and two interesting cities and was about 100 km long. Being the foolhardy kid that I am, and full-well knowing better, I neglected to buy a map and it was only once I realized that I had merged onto the wrong highway/"highspeed roaday" and was now in effect doing the entire loop backwards that I bought one. A pleasant day of alternately internally bitching about the arduousness of hills, zooming down winding downhills, and every five minutes thinking "holy crap this world is beautiful" ensued.


The first bloom in a field of sunflowers

Coming into a typical village

Whee! A big castle! (the most famous one in the Czech republic, longterm residence of Charles IV etc)

Why not bring back something home for the kiddies? Say, a pair of brass knuckles or a ninja throwing star (a real, razorsharp one...)

Such is the image of a typical country road. Highways are still fairly rare, since there are small villages very nearby and it wouldn't make sense to keep merging and unmerging etc, so this is what people drive on to get anywhere. At some point someone decided to plant trees along all the country roads, so most of the stretches have either apple or cherry trees alongside them, and you can eat the fruit, provided you don't mind that it might eventually give you cancer from the exhaust fumes, which I don't. Typical irresponsibility of youth, I know.

Main lesson of the day-Invest in maps. Prague is big. I realized this when I rode into Černošice, which is technically in the jurisdiction of Prague but very far away from my quarter, so in effect I added another 20 km to my already significant 100 km. At or around the moment of this realization, it started raining. Not drizzling, not spitting, more like a the-gods-coming-down-from-Vallhalla thunderstorm downpour. The picture doesn't do it justice. So I rode another fifteen miles in the rain in the shoulder alongside the cars, singing songs from Juno to keep myself company. And you know what? It was fun! Coming through the centre I passed another cyclist who had a wide grin on his face. Maybe he just proposed to his girlfriend, maybe he got promoted at work, but I like to think that he was reveling in the thunderstorm too.

This morning my intent was to go run, but my body informed me, loudly, that I had just biked 120 km, was in significant pain, had slept ten hours and could have slept more, and my intent could go bother someone else. So I went back to bed. Cheers.

Sorry for the long post, I need to curtail my rambling.