Their own Waterloo      They say we look like ABBA – mixed quartet with a mirror-like symmetry axis between the blonde and the bronze, with only one difference – we sing with our bodies... Our Waterloo begins on Tuesday. On a cloudy, snowy, cold Tuesday when thick greyness of the European sky sticks on to your skin and encumbers all movement. On this Tuesday adventitious travellers at the Vienna airport join their efforts in search of a miniature smoking-room, easily mistaken with a box of matches - cautiously isolated sanctuary, where shattered nerves can be comfortably calmed with two minutes of silent pleasure in the company of red duty-free Marlboro packet. Unusual solidarity for the beginning of a new week... Time passes sluggishly on this Tuesday, marked with subsequent doses of “plane” food – rubber-like chicken served from plastic containers, secure cutlery and individually wrapped lonely toothpick. Seconds passing languidly do not hamper, however, a warmed-up refreshing tissue scented with camomile. It is like a divine vehicle of tourist phantasmagoria, ruthlessly retracting clock’s hands and making the empty afternoon a further six hours longer – the afternoon that is still familiar and comfortable, but no longer Polish, rather completely new, branded with red-and-white stripes and shiny stars. Undiscovered afternoon of bridges, hanging above folded greyness of water like matches; the afternoon of eternally whirling threads of highway. The afternoon of the familiar skyline, depicted on innumerable posters and chocolate boxes. The skyscrapers brutally cut into the orange of American sky. The first afternoon in Manhattan.
New York in a week      We saw everything a genuine tourist should see – grotesquely attentive Statue of Liberty relentlessly watching Americans hurrying home after work, carefree faces of skaters at the Rockefeller Center - short breath would not even dare to stain the multiplied jauntiness of their smiles. The biggest American toy store arises in front of us, gigantic construction of steel and glass right in the middle of Times Square, a monster filled with air sticky with all the toxic fumes of vanilla and chocolate. And behind broad panes of glass - Broadway with all its splendours, hundreds of cars passing every second and international hubbub all around. It is a Babel Tower of the East Coast, where stench from the sewers blends with compelling aromas of Chinese food and nuts roasted in sugar. And finally Ground Zero – gloomy cemetery in the middle of vaporous, colourful melting pot. Behind the fence of wire netting – a staring crowd with Made in Taiwan cameras... Being obedient tourists, we diligently find all the sights familiar from Pascal’s guidebooks and colourful postcards. Nevertheless, it was overleaf this shiny postcard that we saw pictures of the real city – two worlds, utterly different, separated from one another with streets crossing at ideally right angle. Where you normally write your “Greetings from...” - black, uncontrollable island of Queens – our adoptive home with its black streets, black puddles and black dilapidated Chevrolet cars deprived of rear windows. And suddenly our grotesquely white European faces... On the other side – in place of greyish address lines – ludicrously Polish Green Point; Polish florists, mangle stores, hair-dressers. Polish store round the corner, where Polish blonde-haired sales-assistant sells Polish butter. All this wrapped in American paper with shiny American ribbon... And finally Chinatown, Little Italy and Harlem scattered, where no one could put a stamp any more...Birds’ amphitheatre, new God’s playground sliced with the network of roaring, rusty subway. New York in all its glamour.
	Sunday in Chicago      The oasis of Polishness with oilcloth-covered tables. One fast Polish sour soup, tripe and a serving of pierogi accompanied by American carols... No time for sightseeing on Sunday – only fronts of buildings and shop windows viewed through car windows and from the trunk. And the theatre – unreal, phantasmagoric, heterogeneous theatre – Copernicus Center. Weeping instruments compete with the greasy smell of pop corn - sticky, buttery stench lingers on the skin, irritates eyes, tickles lungs with hot dust. Yelling strings sting the skin. This is not the right time, however, to give way to dancing anatomy. Lights go out, feeling of insecurity is pushed to the very back of our consciousness and for the last time we hold our breaths. On Sunday we finally heard the longed-for applause. It began on Tuesday and ended on Sunday – our last evening together, two glasses of wine and we all turn our minds to the carp and the Christmas tree. On Sunday it is time to go home. ABBA, recreated for a split second, obediently vanishes again, with only a remnant echo of Waterloo behind their back – “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders”