Late that night, my digestive tract felt very uncomfortable. Around seven in the morning, I thought that I was feeling better, but suddenly my sixty years of experience with stomach viruses and food poisonings told me that I should head immediately for the bathroom. I was correct.
Our plans to go back to the Old Town for the morning were immediately dropped. Agnieszka called a friend who is a doctor and can speak English. After a discussion of the symptoms, it was decided that before we caught the 2:27 train back to Berlin, I should rest, drink large quantities of very hot mint tea and eat nothing except bread and an extremely bland mush very similar to Cream of Wheat.
With the help of this regimen, and a very sweet syrup of aluminum phosphate (or something of the sort), I was feeling somewhat like a human being when we went to the Central Station. When Agnieszka went to park her car, a man walking through the lot gave her hand directions to avoid hitting the neighboring cars. “How nice of him,” I thought, then, the cynic in me immediately (and correctly) smelled a rat. When Agnieszka got out, the man asked for money. She offered him two zloty (about two-thirds of a dollar, I think), which he accepted. Of course, as Agnieszka and I explained later to Mary Joy, this was a low-grade protection racket. The implication was that if she didn’t pay, something bad might happen to her car. It would have been a problem if he had scowled at her offer. She would have had to raise her offer or risk the consequences.
We were early and, in the end, the train left more than half an hour late. Very graciously, Agnieszka stayed with us the whole time, waving goodbye as we left the station.
When I was talking with the doctor on the phone that morning, she said that it was too bad that this bad thing had happened to me on our last day in Warsaw and that she hoped that it wouldn’t leave me with bad memories of the city. I replied that any bad memories would be more than offset by my many wondeful memories.
No comments:
Post a Comment