We consumed our morning double espressos in the beer garden overlooking the city. It turned out that the coffee shop up here already served double espressos as their “espresso.” So when we’d ordered a double, we’d actually received four shots of the good stuff.
By the end of breakfast I had the shakes. I felt like I was going through heroin withdrawal. The amount of coffee we had just consumed was unhealthy. Now that I think about it, we had been drinking nothing but coffee, beer, and wine since we’d arrived in Europe. I am usually good about hydrating, but when water cost the same amount as beer, water rarely won that fight.
We left the coffee shop and made our way toward the Vltava River to roam the New Town. We were trying to decide if we liked Prague or Berlin better, and whether we liked Berlin better than Amsterdam. Then it dawned on me: by ranking these cities, we were quantifying them. We shouldn’t try to quantify our experiences; we had loved every city we’d been to thus far, so there was no point in ranking them. Paris may be the prettiest city, but the beer in Belgium, the people in Netherlands, and the energy in Berlin were just as special in their own ways.
We strolled aimlessly and joyfully down the old, pristine roads and wrapped up our first full day in Prague by drinking a bottle of wine at dinner and watching a pub crawl of college kids stamp drunkenly through the streets. They seemed so childish to us as we elegantly sipped our wine, but we realized we were only four years removed from those college days.
Here we were, four years later in the dreaded so-called real world that every adult in our lives had warned us about. I think Ash’s and my generation is trapped in a tough period between the perceived lifestyle of the last two generations (the Boomers and Gen Xers) and the technological advancements and worldwide globalization of the last two decades, which has dramatically altered the landscape of the new normal workforce. This has created the paradox wherein so many people in their thirties, forties, and fifties are now taking the jobs that Millennials need in their late twenties. I was starting to realize that traveling the world and taking a step off the ladder for four months may help me find the elevator—that is, the elevator to happiness, which contrary to what I had believed (and had drilled into my head) growing up, may not necessarily be a high-paying job with a great title.
As we walked back across the bridge and started the steep ascent, it turned out to be a tougher climb up—four hundred steps—to get to the beer garden that we’d thought, but the view was worth the work.