(Krakow, 5/19/05)
The pharmacist suggested that I find a doctor, and gave us the address of one in the town square. Initially I think we ended up in an optometrist's office, because the receptionist (who didn't speak English) formed circles with her hands and held them to her eyes, like Charades-land glasses.

Eventually we found an office that housed all sorts of doctors. Their schedules (sometimes as brief as two hours per day) were spelled out on the wall next to the receptionist, a stern-looking woman who wore a tight helmet of hair and sat behind a sheet of glass.

"Hi. Do you speak English?" I asked her in Polish, utilizing nearly my entire vocabulary. In response, she parted her tense, lipless mouth just enough to let the word "nyeh" escape and turned back to her work, thereby terminating our conversation.

During the hour that followed, three random patients and one doctor provided me with various instructions, ultimately directing me to a bench outside the door of a general practitioner.

The office was painted a pale, colorless blue, and the scale and cot were made of heavy, 1950s metal. My chair was positioned opposite a friendly round-faced doctor, and next to the room's only window, which looked out over the beautiful main square. I could see people in traditional outfits parading by, to the muffled noise of uniform horns.

The doctor performed the standard operations (pulse, blood pressure), but the majority of our time was spent passing a borrowed dictionary back and forth, pointing to words, gesticulating, squinting in confusion, and laughing.

He had the patience of someone who'd had a long career that was coming to a quiet and satisfying end. He steadily wrote everything out by hand—my prescription, my name, my Brooklyn address. I hardly recognized the words, not because he had sloppy handwriting (it was neat and careful), but because he formed his letters by different (Polish) guidelines. They were sharp, and took on the shape of a healthy EKG reading.

At the end of fifteen minutes, we shook hands and smiled, our challenging (and believe it or not, fun) exchange behind us. Then I returned to the pharmacist and ate some funny-named pills, trusting that my temporary doctor and I had indeed made a connection, and that the pills wouldn't make me lose my sight or grow a beard or anything. I'm doing fine, it turns out.

[excerpts from my trip to europe]

(London, 5/15/05)
Richard fed us too many drinks (who drinks wine as if they're drinking shots?), first on the sidewalk that curled around a corner pub, and then at dinner. We hadn't planned to go to London at all, but we had a layover there that we decided to stretch to its 24-hour limit, and managed to acquire 23.2 of it.

Which means that on Friday night, we rested a single crooked airplane-hour, and on Saturday (post the London Eye with Esther, the Tate Modern, running into friends, an impromptu cab tour of the city, and the introduction of a strange older lady into our evening), we slept for 120 lightning minutes before catching our flight to Berlin.

...

(Berlin, 5/23/05)
The man was staggering purposefully and yelling at pedestrians waiting to cross the street. I didn't pay attention to him until he was in our faces, releasing hot, beery breath with each syllable. "Are you from Jerusalem?" he asked Todd (without judgment, we deduced). "Palestine?" He held his beer tightly at its throat, slurred his words, and stood with his feet apart, for balance.

I'm not quite sure what all he told us (besides that he would let us have a sip of his beer for 400 Mark), but he went on for a long time, during several changes of the light. I kept hoping for the timing of the light to coordinate with the periods in his sentences, but there were no periods in his sentences at all, it turned out. We finally interrupted him and told him, gently, that it was time for us to go. He responded by trying to cup Todd's face in his hands, and then he stumbled in my direction and spurted, "May I give you a kiss?"

"See you later!" we called from the middle of the road. "Nice chatting with you!" from the other side of the street.

Hi, I'm back from my trip. (More about that soon, when my head no longer feels like it contains the Atlantic Ocean.)

I'm leaving for Europe in two days, and although I've spent lots of time reading travel guides, emailing friends abroad, and coordinating schedules, I don't feel like much has been learned or determined. Part of the problem, I think, is my post-it note habit. I tend to jot down reminders and lists on the tiniest surfaces available and then throw them in my bag or stuff them in my pocket, either to be discovered months down the road, or turned into a sticky mass of colorful paper full of (sometimes redundant) suggestions. I've promised myself that tonight I will compile my notes into something organized and meaningful. Maybe I'll use a big sheet of notebook paper, or even a computron.

The things I know for sure: the London arrival time, that at 3:00 on Saturday I'll be on a giant ferris wheel, the phone numbers of the people I'm staying with, the Berlin arrival time, how long it takes to get to Krakow, and how to say "Excuse me, do you speak English?" and "I don't understand" in Polish.

The most productive hour of planning I had, I believe, is the hour that my friend Karolina spent explaining her native language to me, a lesson which included repeated explanations as to why Polish people are prejudiced against vowels. It was fun, unlike most planning activities, and I filled the margins of my travel guide with the phonetic versions of helpful phrases. For example: Pro-shuh, chuh pahn movie po ahn ghel sku? (Now you speak Polish as well as I do! Well done.)

Whenever I jump on a trampoline (once a year or so), I rediscover that I can do most of the tricks I used to be able to perform, but that my body is no longer filled with helium, like it was when I was a kid. Also, I start panting after ten bounces and I can't afford to concentrate on grace, because the majority of my attention is spent on execution.

Naturally, I'm relieved when I confirm I can still fling myself around without too much difficulty or fear. (Anyway, I tend to worry more about my body eventually refusing to cooperate out of stubborn oldness, than I do about breaking my neck.)

Yesterday I had the rare opportunity to jump on a friendly stranger's trampoline, in a suburb of Albany. Here's a little movie of it.

On Saturday, Amanda and I rode around with Joe, a friendly 74-year-old taxi driver from the Lower East Side. His cab was brand new (it still smelled new, even) and lacked the partition that usually separates the driver from his passengers. (Joe said he didn't need any such thing, that no one would dare give him trouble. He also referred to himself as a "people person," pronouncing each syllable with conviction.)

He spoke with an accent that was so perfectly New York that it seemed entirely fake; he's one of the only people I've ever conversed with who used the phrase "fuggedaboudit" in full sincerity, and dismissed people he didn't trust simply by calling them "crooks." (It briefly occurred to me to take a picture of his accent, before my subconscious reminded me that that wasn't possible.)

He'd been driving a cab for 47 years, he said, before making us guess his age. I asked him if he had any crazy office stories, and he replied, "Just wait till you read the book! You'd better believe I got stories." I coaxed him into telling me just one of them, which turned out to be about a 15-year-old runaway from Ohio who wanted to be dropped off on the Upper West Side in the middle of the night. (He didn't mention what year it was this happened, but earlier he'd said that he stopped working nights long ago, in order to spend more time with his wife.) I feel like he skipped some important information, or that I might've misunderstood him, because next he said, "To make a long story short, she threw her breast over the seat. And you know what? I threw it right back at her!"

The three of us rode around Tribeca for more than two hours. I was on assignment, taking pictures (in various locations) of the digital sign that was mounted on the top of his car. At one point, after being shooed away by film festival security guards, Amanda and I walked down the median of the West Side Highway and photographed the vehicle from afar. Mostly, though, no one bothered us.