We got on the bus at 7:30 in the morning, about three hours after I had gotten home the night before. An alarmingly thick fog hung over the highway, reducing the scenic Bohemian countryside to a gray nothingness. When we arrived, mist caked our skin and we slipped across the wet cobblestones on our way through the town.

Cesky Krumlov has been carved nearly into an island by the winding Vltava river. The streets are meticulously pointless, rising and falling, snaking around corners into an unkempt mass that always brings you to somewhere you’ve already been. On the other side of the river lies an endless castle, topped by an ornate red, white, and green tower. The castle’s walls are built into a cliff, jagged rocks transitioning into the perfectly smooth building walls.

After lunch and a nap, we went on a tour of the castle grounds and tower. From the top of the spiral staircases you can see the entire town and the mountains that surround it. The rooftops are crammed between each side of the river, reaching outward in every direction. Each building is completely unique in size and orientation, but again they seemed to form a single haphazardly cohesive entity. The surrounding mountains obscured the horizon as the fog crept over them, down into the streets. From the tower we descended into the town’s monotony, with roughly ten hours ahead of us to explore five streets. The rest of the trip dragged on through an endless mist.