An enduring legacy of my mixed heritage is that I’ve never felt Jewish enough. At my predominantly Jewish high school in New York, I never bonded with my classmates over having gone to Hebrew school, or fallen asleep in synagogue, or muddled through the Torah portion of my Bar Mitzvah. My own justification for such inexperience has come in the form of penance. It’s no wonder that the only Jewish holiday I make a habit of celebrating is Yom Kippur, where atonement for a year of ignorance comes in denying the pleasure of food. Or maybe every Jew secretly feels that they’re not Jewish enough? Perhaps that’s the true miracle of Jewish guilt.

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.

On our last morning in Zurich, I was prepared to have to donate a kidney to pay for breakfast. But much to our surprise, we were presented with one of our favorite meals of the trip: a €14.50 “one plate buffet.” It reminded me of how I used to insist on celebrating my birthdays at Sizzler growing up; I never tired of the thrill of filling up an empty plate, getting my money’s worth and overeating to the point of feeling sick. Only this time was different; I only had one chance to make it count. The buffet featured scrambled eggs, sausage, smoked salmon, mushrooms with bacon, caprese salad, and six different spreads on toast. It was impossible to see the trim or the color of my plate when I walked back to my seat; one German couple even stopped mid-conversation just to glare.

We woke up to our first alarm clock in nearly two weeks, the sound so startling it felt for a moment like there had been a fire smoldering in our building overnight. We were to depart on a train that morning from Blois to Zurich and, to our further shock, arrived at the train station early. The concept of arriving early to board transportation took me years to come to terms with. Courtney, long familiar with my occasional lapses when it comes to judging the time it takes to get places, used to goad me into getting to airports and train stations early with the promise of Auntie Anne’s pretzels or browsing the pulp fiction at Hudson News.