"A week after college graduation, a year after the fall of Communism, with no qualifications to speak of, I found myself in a faraway land about which I knew nothing, and that suited me. I woke up in Prague, and my new boss assigned me my first task: drive his rental car to Budapest.
“A history major, a spy-fiction fan, a child, I was pursued in my eight hours alone in the 1990 Opel by Nazis, the KGB, and adulthood. What if the job was boring? What if work or adulthood itself were poisonous to the best part of you, whatever that was?
“My map of Budapest said I was two streets away from my goal, but I couldn't see the turn. I kept driving along a wall. Finally an English-speaker pointed me in the right direction: up. I had been blindly circling the base of a fortified hill, a few hundred feet below Avis. I just had to find the way in, and up the serpentine path, to my new city, my new life, the future."
