“You might want to tell Kitty to keep her ideas to herself.”

“I’m not catastrophizing,” I tell Mimi. “Do you know how many people were murdered in Prague last year?”

“Do you?”

“No, but I bet it’s more than Toronto.”

“What about New York?”

“Sure,” I say, “but we’re not in New York.”

Mimi ignores me and consults the guidebook. “How far do you want to walk?”

I don’t believe in cosmic laws, but I’ve come to accept that there is an inverse relationship between good restaurants and wherever we happen to be. The better the restaurant, the farther away we are from it.

Mimi closes the book. “Okay,” she says, “I’ve got the perfect spot.”

“So, how far do we have to walk?”

“Not far,” she says, and she heads off down the street at a slow trot.

MIMI HAS A THEORY that travel makes time stop. Or at least slows it down. Her reasoning has a simple elegance. When you’re home, you fall into routines. These routines are so familiar that you do them without even thinking or noticing the passage of time. You get up, have breakfast, check your emails, go to work, have lunch, finish work, come home, have dinner, watch some television, go to bed. And every so often, you look up and wonder where in the heck the time went.

When you’re travelling, everything is new, and every minute is taken up with decision-making.

Tick tock, tick tock.

Exhausting.

Today it’s been breakfast, the Kafka museum, articulated men peeing in a fountain, and it’s barely noon. We still have most of the day left to fill.

You went to Rome and didn’t see the Colosseum?

You stayed in Barcelona and didn’t see the Gaudi church?

You spent a week in Amsterdam and didn’t go to the Rijksmuseum?

Athens and you only saw the Acropolis from your hotel window?

Tick tock, tick tock.

The first obligation of any vacation is that you experience as much as you can. Wandering the streets, coffee in cafés, sitting on park benches don’t count.

MIMI’S IDEA OF “not far” turns out to be far enough.

We walk for at least half an hour. If I had been smart, I would have timed it in case I needed to use it as an example later.

“The Nusle district,” says Mimi, “and we’re almost there.”

My hip is beginning to hurt. My toes feel as though the ends have been filed off.

“And here we are.”

An ordinary street. It could be anywhere in the world. I could close my eyes for a moment and open them to find myself in Ottawa. Or San Francisco. Or Montevideo.

Or Prague.

I have to shield my eyes to see the sign. It’s dark red and white and features the image of a stylized Indian eating an entire pizza.

Baressa Pizza and Pasta.