Friday morning I drove to Miami to see my friend Zosia who is visiting from Warsaw. Listening to Chopin's Scherzo No. 1 on Classical South Florida I thought I heard echoes of my favorite Polish Christmas carol, "Lulajze Jezuniu."
Driving home I listened to the Anna German CD Zosia had given me.
But before I got here, I stopped in Hollywood to see our friends Magda and Ryszard. Ryszard was listening to a Polish radio station that was playing the top ten songs for the week. "They're all sad," he complained while the No. 3 song played. A short time later, the No. 1 song came on. It was by the old rock band Kult. "Nine sad," said Ryszard, "and one angry."
I came back from Poland - where bookstores have large sections devoted to travel literature, sometimes next to sections of international reportage - to find Extreme RVs on the Travel Channel.
Oh, and the new editor of Conde Nast Traveler is the former editor of Martha Stewart Living.
Among the things Hania brought back from Poland Sunday – jewelry, ceramics, vodka – was my secret police file, which she obtained at the beautifully named Institute of National Memory. The file makes for very dull reading, which I have to take most of the blame for; my two and a half years in Warsaw were more queue-and-tutor than cloak-and-dagger. But reading one official document after another I have come to the conclusion that the disintegration of communism in Eastern Europe was partly the result of a collective sense of boredom.
Overnight flight from Miami to Frankfurt, sitting in the last row of the next-to-last section, just by the galley where, when the flight attendants weren't banging carts, passengers were stretching their legs and vocal chords.
9 a.m. breakfast in Frankfurt - all the tables around us held tall glasses of beer, delivered by a cheerful waitress from Thailand.
Arrived in Warsaw at 1:30. Hania's new brown suitcase was the first to fall onto the luggage carousel. It had bright new ribbons I assumed were tied by TSA after they opened it and found nothing suspicious inside.
Her cousin Jurek and his wife Monika took us to their apartment in Muranow, a block from the new Jewish museum. I carried Hania's heavy suitcase - no elevator - up to the third floor. We were shown around the apartment, then Hania went to get something from her suitcase which, it turned out, was not her suitcase. So I carried the heavy thing down two flights of stairs and we all drove back to Chopin Airport as if having quickly decided Poland wasn't for us.
Inside the airport we explained the problem to the man at the information booth. With a wry smile, he gave us a number to call. Shortly, a man in a tie appeared and walked us through a passageway that led back to the luggage carousels. He disappeared into the lost luggage room and reappeared with Hania's suitcase. We gave him the one we had taken.
The next morning we woke up to sunshine, turned on the radio, and heard a man singing: "Vamos a la playa."
I was going to write about my trip this week but I've been too mesmerized by Wimbledon. The commentators have rightly pointed out the novelty of an all-Polish men's quarterfinal (Jerzy Janowicz vs. Lukasz Kubot) while failing to mention that the women's semifinal (Agnieszka Radwanska vs. Sabine Lisicki) will also be between two Polish speakers (Lisicki's parents emigrated from Poland to Germany in 1979). For at least one tournament, Polish has replaced Russian as the language of the practice courts. To dobrze.
I should mention, before leaving Lincoln Road, that the buildings aren't the only things of beauty on it. Saturday I was reminded of walking the streets of Warsaw in the early '80s with their impressive array of beautiful women. (There in the reportedly drab, grey Soviet Bloc.) But different from South Beach, in Warsaw, in January, the faces were encased in sheepskin coats, fox collars, wool scarves, nutria hats. And the best of them were not just beautiful but interesting.