25 Years, Three Cities, and a Wall That Had to Fall

There’s a mural on the Berlin Wall of two men kissing. Full on the mouth, eyes closed, completely committed to the moment. Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker, Soviet and East German leaders, frozen mid-embrace above the words My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.

We kissed in front of it, naturally. It was one degree below freezing and there was a line of people waiting to take a picture while we were trying to figure out the lip angles. Still. You gotta do it.

We were there because 36 years before this trip, that wall came down. And if it hadn’t, a young American man would never have been able to wander into Czech Republic, befriend a guy who brought him home to Slovakia, where a girl had just come back from travels wondering what to do with her life. They rang her doorbell and, 25 years later, here we are, still astonished by the series of lucky events that led to this life we’ve built together.

We wanted a slow trip. Breakfasts that stretched until noon because neither of us had anywhere to be, beautiful pools and hot saunas in the middle of January, cozy and quiet while the city froze outside. Good food, walks, hand in hand, without a destination, the kind of trip where you get to just be together, without the noise of ordinary life drowning anything out.

We celebrated in three cities that shaped us: Prague, where we got engaged, Berlin, where the wall once stood, and Vienna, our last trip before the wedding.

The trip started, as they always do, at the beginning.

Prague: The Sugar Palace

Getting there was half the fun. We could have taken a direct train from Slovakia, like sensible adults. Instead, we left in the dark before dawn, walked to the station, took the train to Bratislava, and waited an hour at a freezing train station just so we could board a RegioJet to Prague.

For roughly the same price as the easy (boring) option, we got wide leather seats facing each other, a steward, and breakfast: red Thai curry, beer, three coffees, two slabs of cake. $13 for all of it. Four hours later, we arrived fed, rested, and slightly smug.

The Andaz Prague is a former sugar palace, headquarters of a 19th century sugar magnate, and it looks the part. Ceilings so tall you could stand on someone’s shoulders and still not be able to change the light bulb. A golden frog on the bathroom mirror. Curtain ties shaped like hands. A head of a lion peeking over the bed.

We almost didn’t stay there. I’d originally booked a perfectly nice Lindner hotel I’ve been to before, and felt fine about it. But then we decided that the pretty, artsy, quirky (and new to us) Andaz might be more fitting to kick off our anniversary trip. An unexpected wave of joy washed over me. I hadn’t realized I was settling until I wasn’t anymore – something to file away for future reference, probably about more than hotels.

That first evening, we went looking for the Andaz Sensory Experience, listed in the hotel materials with enough mystery that we had no idea what, where, or when it even was.

The bar was the first logical stop. Empty. We almost turned back, when a bartender sat us down and placed three paper cones under glass domes on the table. “Smell these scents”, she said. “We’ll make you a cocktail based on whichever one you like best.” We each chose a different one. Three drinks arrived, including a virgin cocktail for our friend John who’d materialized from Prague’s old town to join us. Nobody asked for a room number. Nobody asked for anything. We sipped our drinks, chatted for a couple of hours, and went up to our room. John and Mark being Californians, naturally, we ordered Mexican food.

The next morning John came back with his girlfriend Sarah, and within about five minutes we were wondering how we could keep her. We talked, sitting in one of the pretty living rooms in the lobby, then went to Koko Organic for lunch, where Sarah steered us toward the purple sticky rice with tofu, seitan, and peanut sauce. I’m still dreaming about it. Before we parted ways, they pointed us toward the bus station so we’d have no trouble finding it the next day.

Berlin: The Wall, the Butler, and Nine Chocolates

In a double-decker RegioJet bus, top deck, front row gave us a better view than the driver had, and the mild anxiety that comes with watching someone tailgate from six feet above their head. Four hours of winter landscape, three coffees from the machine on the bottom deck, and then Berlin.

The Grand Hyatt, just minutes’ walk from where the Berlin wall once stood, met us with champagne chilling in an ice bucket and chocolate truffles on a table of our 5th floor room. A note congratulated us on 25 years.

The hotel has the feel of somewhere that was very posh in 1985 and has decided to lean into it rather than apologize. Sturdy everything. Thick glass shelves. A bathtub and shower enclosed behind a glass door like a room within a room. And on the seventh floor, a club lounge that would become the gravitational center of our Berlin days.

That’s where we met Kim, Vietnamese by birth, Hungarian by upbringing, Berlin by choice. She ran the lounge the way you’d run a good dinner party. She looked like you were the highlight of her day and knew that you liked lemongrass tea by day two. She told us about coming to Europe as a kid. Her mom, big on roots and tradition, only fed her if she spoke Vietnamese. Kim also told us about a penis festival in Japan that we’d definitely get a kick out of.

Then there was Tilman. Twenty-something, studying hotel management with a goal of becoming a butler at the Japanese embassy. In an era when you ask kids what they want to be and they answer “a millionaire” as if it was a job, here was someone who had thought carefully about what excellence in service actually looks like and decided to dedicate himself to it. The day before his school week started, he came in to say goodbye.

Berlin keeps surprising you like that. One minute you’re talking to a twenty-year-old who already knows exactly where he’s going, the next you’re standing in front of a wall that used to decide that for people.

Eight floors up, the Club Olympus felt less like a hotel spa and more like the kind of serious health club serious people join and actually use. Indoor pool, Finnish sauna, steam bath, whirlpool, cold plunge you climbed into via a ladder, naked, trying to look casual about it.

Between the spa and the lounge, it was hard to leave the hotel. But of course, we had to go and find the Wall. At Potsdamer Platz, fragments of it still stand, sticking out right by the metro station. A line in the pavement marks where the rest of it ran. We stood on either side, Mark on the West, me on the East, holding hands, while cars rolled through and kids ran back and forth across the line, completely unbothered. Just three decades ago, crossing that line could get you shot.

We took a bus to the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining stretch of the wall, covered with murals. On one side, regular road and a sidewalk. On the other, space where the death strip once was. We walked the whole 1.3 kilometers, looking at the murals and coming up with increasingly wild scenarios for how we would’ve found each other even if the wall hadn’t come down.

The next day at the Brandenburg Gate, which spent 28 years stranded in the death strip belonging to neither East nor West, a woman was playing beautifully haunting music. Now the gate just stands there, in the middle of a very normal city, with tourists and pigeons and a violinist.

Berlin also has a chocolate factory. Rausch, near the Opera, claims to be the largest chocolate house in Europe, sources its cacao from individual farms around the world, and sells it in bars by country of origin and percentage. We got 9 kinds of chocolate and walked out into the cold feeling very sophisticated. We then wandered into a Volkswagen showroom next door, which had an original Beetle and the new love bus. Because Berlin.

It turns out that tasting nine single-origin chocolates in a beautiful hotel room is an extremely dignified way to spend an anniversary. The night train from Berlin to Vienna, on the other hand, had not gotten a memo that we were celebrating. Instead of a romantic European sleeper, we got bright lights the sterile hue of an emergency room at 4am and seats that made our back ache.

Vienna: Sleeping in a Bank

We arrived exhausted, slightly crumpled, and were shown to our swanky Park Hyatt room at 8am, full seven hours before the official check-in time. The train was forgiven.

Vienna is a city that practically demands you appreciate its history. But there is a big difference between looking at history and actually sleeping in it. Before it was a five-star hotel, this gorgeous building was the headquarters of a 1915 bank. They’ve kept the bones of the place intact. High ceilings, cold marble, the kind of place that makes you automatically stand up straighter.

Downstairs, in the former bank vault, is the spa, open to all guests. In a hotel of this grandeur, there is a distinct lack of dignity in sharing an elevator with a three-piece suit while you’re in your waffle-weave bathrobe and hotel slippers. To survive the ride, we looked confidently straight ahead, acting as if we’d occupied the penthouse since the bank era and this was simply our local custom.

The air changes down there. It’s cooler, quieter, underground. The original vault door still stands there, behind glass like a museum exhibit. The pool is beautiful, but the real surprise is underwater. Head out, silence. Head in the water, clear, lovely music. We floated on our backs, listening. The whole area is so serene, you find yourself whispering as you make the circuit from the sauna to the pool and relaxation loungers.

The breakfast buffet is said to be one of the finest in Europe, and priced accordingly, at over 50 euro per person. We splurged on Saturday morning and it delivered on almost every count. Five kinds of fresh squeezed juice. Truffled scrambled eggs with shavings large enough to consider pocketing them. Champagne, caviar, salmon, local meats and cheeses, all included. The coffee, however, was among the worst either of us have ever had, a remarkable achievement in a city that treats coffee as a religion. Mark talked to the waiter, who brought him a better one.

The evening before we were due to leave, neither of us quite ready to go home, we booked one extra night at Andaz Vienna. We had no idea yet how necessary that decision would turn out to be.

On our last morning at the Park Hyatt Vienna, we packed, said goodbye to the white marble bathroom, the vault pool, and the underwater music, and headed for the lobby. On the last stair, I stepped wrong and went down like a sack of potatoes, backpack pinning me flat to the carpet in the lobby of one of the finest hotels in Vienna, a few yards from the reception. Nobody noticed. I lay there for a moment, taking stock of the situation. Mark wanted to call a doctor. I wanted to believe the pain that felt like a dagger in my ankle would stop in a few seconds. We sat down on a bench for fifteen minutes to find out who was right.

Eventually I could hobble out. We took the metro to Andaz Vienna, where the staff seemed genuinely pleased to see us rather than well trained to seem pleased to see us. Up in the room, Mark ran a bath for me, propped my foot up, and went out to find food. He returned with kebab meat and veggies. “Protein and vitamins,” he said, with the authority of someone who had clearly googled “sprained ankle nutrition” on the way to the shop. The receptionist brought me a pack of ice for the foot, now turning blue. I lay there, swollen foot in the air, in an artsy Viennese hotel we’d booked on a whim the night before.

The Park Hyatt was a stunning place to visit. The Andaz was a much better place to be.

36 years ago, a wall came down. 25 years ago, a doorbell rang. We’ve spent the years since figuring out how to live well, which, it turns out, includes knowing which credit cards earn points redeemable for nights in places like these.

The wall was history. The doorbell was luck. Everything else was just showing up, in ordinary moments and, occasionally, in extraordinary hotels.