If you had told me this was how my midlife was going to look, I would have assumed you had confused me with someone much more interesting.

 

Tyson is, in fact, the cool one, the plot twist. Decades spent running restaurants have apparently turned him into a sort of human homing pigeon for good food, interesting bars and experiences that you would never think to look for yourself. I am more likely to have a spreadsheet. He is more likely to do two minutes of casual research and say, “Trust me. We're going here.”

 

This particular January afternoon, “here” happened to be a political demonstration.

 

We had come to Prague for the usual reasons: the architecture, the history, the beer, the food, the romance of a city that seems almost deliberately designed to make you walk around at night. We had not come to participate in Czech politics. And yet, somewhere along the way, we found ourselves in the middle of a crowd gathered in support of the pro-European president, surrounded by Czech flags and the unmistakable energy of people who believe the direction of their country matters.

 

This was not the first time the people here have undertaken something they care about peacefully.  In 1989, the people of Czechoslovakia staged what would be later called the “Velvet Revolution”, a peaceful uprising in that brought an end to four decades of communist rule.  

 

Bored with simply watching the crowd, Tyson scampered up a very unsafe-looking (and very tall) trash receptacle, stood on top of it, taking wobbly photos and videos of the gathered.  An old man tugged on my sleeve and asked me to give his phone to Tys so he could have a video record of the event, too. At least I thought that’s what he asked, because the question was in Czech.

 

It was an odd and wonderful way to begin a trip, and, in retrospect, a pretty good metaphor for the whole thing.  

 

Prague was not the only place where politics seemed to be humming just beneath the surface. By the time we reached Budapest, the feeling was different. Less outwardly so, perhaps, but no less palpable. Hungary was approaching an election that could finally unseat its long-standing far-right government (spoiler: the far-right’s clutch on power in Hungary is no mas), and there was a sense that the entire city was waiting to see what would happen.

 

We were tourists, but it was impossible not to notice.  

But somehow, between the protests and the politics, we found hot winter wine for sale out of the windows of restaurants, enormous Czech beers, incredible restaurants Tyson kept finding, and a rather spectacular light museum in Budapest. We wandered through streets that looked like movie sets, ate things we couldn't pronounce, and repeatedly stopped to admire buildings that seemed almost offensively beautiful. Tyson, naturally, always seemed to know where we should go next.

There is something strange and wonderful about traveling with someone who knew you when you were seventeen. You carry around all these old versions of each other, and then suddenly you're sitting across from the same person in a restaurant in Prague, or walking along the Danube, and realizing that neither of you is remotely the person you were then. Fortunately, we seem to like the people we've become.

Maybe that's what made the trip feel so perfectly timed. Prague and Budapest were both wrestling with questions about what comes next, while we were, in our own considerably less consequential way, doing the same thing. Neither of us knew exactly what the next chapter would look like. We just knew we were enjoying the one we were in.

And so I came home with photographs of beautiful buildings, political demonstrations, too much beer, excellent food and Tyson standing on top of a trash receptacle in the middle of Prague.

Not exactly what I expected from midlife.

But then again, “unexpected” seems to be working out pretty well for me.