CHAPTER 18: Echoes of the Stomach

TRUST THE TROUT

We had emerged from the salt mine with our sense of direction scrambled and our asses still tingling from the world’s oldest wooden slide. Lukas was bleeding from his lip. He wiggled one of his front teeth. It was loose. He pulled it from his mouth and placed it in a folded napkin.

There's something profoundly humbling about being shoved into a canvas smock, sent hurtling down an underground ramp built in 1734, smashing your face into hardwood, and then thanked for your participation like it was all part of a dental plan.

Back above ground, Hallstatt still didn’t feel real. It felt like we were walking through a European dollhouse built by a billionaire who was trying to impress God. The air smelled like wood smoke and glacier runoff. The mountains looked Photoshopped. The swans looked unionized. Even the trash cans were cute.

But we were starving. Spiritually, emotionally, and also in the very real sense that we hadn’t eaten anything since a shared apple strudel in Bad Ischl that now felt like a memory from another life.

So we found a lakeside restaurant. One of those little spaces wedged against the water, with creaky floors, sunburnt picnic tables, and the quiet confidence of a place that knows you’ll order the trout because there’s nothing else that makes sense.

We sat in the corner of the patio, beneath a slanted wooden overhang that made the whole thing feel like a confessional booth with a beer license. It was just us, the lake, the cold alpine air, and about three dozen other diners seated neatly in a grid like we were all part of some Austrian symphony about to rehearse collective restraint.

Then the waitress came. She didn’t ask if we wanted the trout. She just said, “You’ll have the trout?”

We nodded. We would, in fact, have the trout.

When it arrived, it was whole. And I mean whole. Eyes, mouth, fins, and the faintest look of contempt still etched into its face. The skin was perfectly crisped, like it had been insulted and roasted in the same motion. It was surrounded by boiled potatoes, lightly buttered, acting like Switzerland on the plate—neutral, reliable, quietly absorbing tension.

We took our first bites in silence.

And it was… phenomenal.

Buttery. Smoky. A little eerie.

It tasted like something that had lived—like it had known things. Like it had seen the bottom of the lake, the underside of boats, and maybe a murder or two. This was not grocery store fish. This was fish with secrets.

The beer arrived just in time to put the brakes on whatever internal monologue the trout had activated in our heads. Cold, crisp, clean. Like swallowing courage. Each sip rewired our nervous systems from hyper-vigilant spy mode to slightly buzzed food critics.

Then came the swans.

Two of them. Regal. Gigantic. Gliding across the lake like bored royalty doing a PR stunt. They moved with that terrifying grace that only animals and ex-lovers have—smooth, silent, deliberate. One of them locked eyes with me. And I swear, in that exact moment, I felt judged. Not just for the fish. For everything. My posture. My past. My Spotify history.

It was all so perfect. Too perfect.

And then—I burped.

I didn’t mean to.

It wasn’t small. It wasn’t cute.

It echoed.

Because of course it did. I was seated in a corner. Under a slanted wooden structure. Facing a wide-open lakeside amphitheater full of people eating in peace. And the sound I unleashed—the raw, elemental throat-thunder that erupted from my body—bounced off the timbers and rolled across the entire outdoor seating area like a drunken alpine yodel.

Every neck turned. Instantly.

A collective snap of vertebrae.

It was like I’d farted in church during a eulogy.

The swans froze. One narrowed its eyes.

Somewhere to my left, we heard a voice—very softly, in an accent both delicate and cutting—say:

“Rude Americans.”

And honestly? Fair.

I was mortified. I wanted to crawl into the lake and live under the dock with the forgotten boat ropes. But before I could fully process my shame spiral, Lukas tried his best to make me feel better.

“You know,” Lukas said, his bottom lip still slightly swollen, speaking through the kind of tragic, post-salt-mine lisp that made him sound like a drunk aristocrat with a dental emergency, “in thome cultures, a loud belch ith conthidered the higheth compliment for a thplendid meal.”

I did my best to pretend that we were participating in an ancient culinary ritual rather than a moment of deep gastrointestinal disgrace. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to die. I wanted to invent a fake Slavic island where burping is revered and claim dual citizenship.

Instead, I stared at the lake.

The trout’s head was still there. Half-skeleton now. Still watching me.

The beer was warm. The swans had resumed gliding.

And the people around us slowly turned back to their meals, their conversations, their curated moments of serenity—now slightly interrupted by the sound of one idiot from across the ocean who couldn't keep his joy quiet.

Maybe that’s all it was.

Maybe it was joy.

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