journal of travel

My breath freezes as soon as it leaves my lungs. Not even halfway up my windpipe it seems to become paralysed by the temperature outside, chilling my body from the inside out. I wonder how cold it has to be before sleet turns to snow. Burying my face in my scarf, I look around for shared empathy. I find none.

Winter in Prague is stunning but it’s cold and it’s desperately quiet. After dark, everyone retreats into sunken old city houses, coloured by yellow lights and burning fireplaces. Alone after a day’s company, the main square exhales in a gust of wind. Leaves gather in a dark corner.

I wait in front of a row of tourist restaurants (lights dimmed, cutlery clinking, English accents) for Josef. I’ve spoken to him on the Internet; he’s agreed to show me around. I can tell it’s him by the way he approaches with his old Nokia phone, holding the weight of a text he’s just sent to my temporary SIM. Josef is painfully shy: he’s the kind of guy who looks at his feet and is afraid to make decisions. He shouldn’t be a tour guide but I’m glad he’s mine.

A child of Communism, he leads me through the cobbled streets, mostly silently. I’m tense from the spikes of January air poking through my jeans, up my sleeves, into every crevice of my face, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He gestures towards a bar and we sit at a table below street level and order red wine. Under his jacket he’s wearing only a t-shirt.

It’s been six weeks of winter and Europe still hasn’t broken into snow. Not when it dipped below freezing on the wet Edinburgh streets, not when the train made its way through the white-topped Alps, not even during the week I had a hole in my shoe and trudged through Austria on a soggy right foot. Not once.

Josef continues to wander — aimlessly, thoughtfully. He has seen this all before (for all I know we have circled the city twice already) yet he looks up at every building and peers down every street like I do: for the first time. Lone wanderers pass us, only their expelled breath a marker of their warm-blooded selves. Other than that, the city does not stir.

Nothing stirs. The air has wiped my mind clean, the cobblestones have rubbed my feet raw and the silence has rendered me unable to speak.

Josef stops as if at some invisible barrier. It seems the right time to interject a goodbye, but then I see it falling in the lamplight, diagonal and soft. Like powder, it sounds like music against the silent city. It was the first snow. My first snow.