It’s amazing what can pass for longing these days. Rain was coming down in thick sheets as we left Therme Vals, heat still beating off my cheeks from a morning trip to the spa before check-out. Courtney and I had decided to get creative by switching up the order of the baths from the recommended circuit: lukewarm then sauna, followed by ice plunge, then back to boiling. Like true free spirits.
But the thing I miss most about the day we left Switzerland was what happened after the baths, after leafing through coffee table books in the hotel’s study, even after the buffet breakfast of muesli and rice milk. Outside in the rain, we huddled beneath a glass shelter, luggage in hand. After some time, a bus came. In Ilanz, where we disembarked, we waited again, this time for a train. Pretty soon, it appeared too, taking us to Chur and then to Zurich. In Zurich, we boarded yet another train to the airport.
The scenery was a wet slurry, impossible to decipher. Traveling itself took nearly the entire day, and I can hardly tell you a single thing we saw. But the very fact that we had started somewhere and ended up somewhere else feels somehow vital. The dim fluorescent lights, a stranger eating an impossibly large pretzel across the aisle, the lurching vibrations of the car as it hummed along the track. I miss it all.
We boarded the flight without a second thought. In our seats, we were served dinner from a steaming tray: fish curry, alfredo pasta, dessert. I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my shirt. “Napkin,” I requested of the flight attendant, gesturing to my face.
When we landed in Prague, it was well past sundown. From the tarmac, we boarded a shuttle that connected seamlessly with the Metro on the way to our hostel. We packed in tight with our fellow passengers, none of us monitoring our breath. The Golden Prague Rooms was located in the heart of the Jewish Quarter. There was no hand sanitizer in the lobby, but upstairs in our room we did find a Toblerone and a bottle of sparkling wine, along with a note that read “With our compliments to the newlyweds.”
From our windows, the nearby town center was bursting with life. We marveled at the crowd gathered outside the medieval astronomical clock, the oldest still in operation. Its main draw was a show, on the hour, of 12 animatronic Apostles processing in a circle. Courtney and I made it at 9pm for the final viewing of the evening. Aside from the Apostles, four other sculptures flank the clock, representing the four things most despised at the time of the clock’s making in 1410. There is vanity, represented by a figure admiring himself in a mirror; greed, by a miser holding a bag of gold; a Turkish figure representing lust and earthly pleasures; and a skeleton representing Death. On the hour, the skeleton rings a bell and rotates an hourglass, to show the Turk that his lifetime is at its end.
The Apostles hadn’t yet finished processing, but we had seen enough. On the street, vendors were peddling ice cream, fried potatoes on sticks, and trdelník, rolled pastries dusted in cinnamon sugar and baked on a rotating spit. We held the still-warm chimney cake in our hands as the crowd began to disperse, unaware that the time for earthly pleasures had already passed.