Work hard. Play hard.

The sun here rises very early. Our bedroom windows face the east, and by 5:30am our room is lit up with morning sun. I find myself waking up around 5:45 even though teacher work days don’t start until 9:00. For this reason by 9 at night, I am usually pretty tired. Heidi calls 9pm “missionary midnight” because, in places without electricity, missionaries get up with the sun and go to bed not long after the sun sets. Staying awake until 9pm most likely means that a missionary has been burning candles for quite a while. Heidi and I have both adopted “missionary midnight” (or perhaps an hour later) as our standard bedtime.  

We have also adopted the Philmont motto “Work hard. Play hard.” As brand-new teachers, we are working very hard! Between learning about the school and its policies, writing year plans for our classes, and going to court every few days for visa paperwork, we are exhausted in the evenings. However, I would have to say that for as hard as we work --- we play just as hard!

On Saturday, four other American teachers (Heidi, Mark, Eric, Whitney) and I met at 8:45 to hike Mt Hradova. Mt Hradova is quite literally our backyard --- and I figured Saturday was as a good a day as any for hiking – aka what I am going to call “yardwork.”

Mt Hradova is one of the smaller mountains by Slovakia standards. Here’s the view of Tisovec from about a third of the way up the mountain.

These are my friends Heidi, Eric and Mark.

We saw the remains of the Tisovec Castle. Sadly, this is all that’s left.

Once we reached the top of the mountain, we had to scramble across the boulder-lined ridge. We were literally crawling across a series of rocks with nothing on either side but a long way down. It wasn’t a technical climb – but I was still nervous. This is the view from the top of Mt Hradova. I am surprised by how green Slovakia is.  

Our hike down Hradova was STRAIGHT down at points along the trail. We handled this by slowing down and droping it a gear – meaning we hunkered down and squatted while walking. We looked pretty silly, and the next day we were all reminded of the fact that we had quadricep muscles.  I'm looking forward to hiking more this weekend.