Wednesday, 01 June 2005 | Bonanza

(Krakow, 5/19/05)
Mike did most of the talking. Whenever his facts got sloppy, Ewa corrected him. "It was six months ago, Mike, not a year." "Was it?" he'd ask, before correcting himself and continuing his story. He told us about his movie collection, (slowly) learning Polish, and his move from Toronto to Dublin to Krakow, in his strange mish-mashed accent. Ewa was from a small town in western Poland, but she sounded almost British.

[Whenever I meet someone because of a random series of events, or due to very specific timing, I'm almost nervous for the past: what if I wouldn't have gone to X exactly at X o'clock? I replay the events in my head as if doing that will glue them in place.]

They seemed excited to show us around, and to introduce us to things we wouldn't have discovered on our own, such as the salty brown cheese that looked like it was made out of wood. Mike carved off flakes of it for us, by drawing a pocketknife toward his thumb. At the time, we were in the middle of a smoky dance club, and were probably about to dance to A-Ha, or Guns'n'Roses, or Nena. It was my favorite night of the whole trip, I think.