Greetings from Warsaw

I met up with the angel about an hour after I arrived. He was walking in the other direction down Kredytowa, and with those long, brown drooping feathers he looked a little like Matt Damon at the end of Dogma. He sat down on the sidewalk across from the university, and someone who was with him set up a tripod and began taking pictures. I asked if I could do the same.

And that was pretty much it. I never found out who he was, or why he was wearing a pair of enormous wings. It's one of the frustrating things about this place — I'm constantly seeing beautiful or amazing or just plain odd things, and I don't have the context in which to place them.

Though sometimes I get clues. The cab driver who brought me from the airport to the city center didn't talk much — though I suspect a lot of what he said were curses — but he did point out the Russian cemetery we passed along the way. I expected him to say something disparaging about the Russians, but he simply said, "Very big battle during the war. Four thousand, dead. No room for graves."

I took a bus out to Wilanów this afternoon, the site of an amazing summer palace, currently under restoration, and a series of gardens along the side of a river. It looked like what I've always wished retirement would be like — all of these old couples, holding hands, walking through mazes of trees and Roman statues and old brick buildings, stopping every now and then to look at the river or each other. Old men calling to squirrels. Groups of children, now and then, calling out "Hello" to me and laughing.

Everything you've heard about the friendliness of the Poles is true. I tend to think of New Yorkers as good-natured folk (at least compared to Bostonians) but none of the New Yorkers I met on the subway this morning would've taken the seat next to me, much less sat down in a cafeteria at the same table with me, smiled, tried to start a conversation... I have to think it's brutal in the winter here — I've never seen so many tanning salons in my life — and yet it seems like a happy place, even if it's totally alien. The language, the names of things are as foreign to me as China ever was.

And yet I saw a woman this afternoon who looked exactly like my grandmother, the way I remember her.

I'm hoping to see her again...