Warsaw has a river running down its middle, an unassuming and turpid ribbon of water with a stairstep concrete enbankment along both of its banks, where you can often find retirees fishing (only people on fixed incomes or those close to death would dare eat fish from the Vistula). In between the embankment and the touristy downtown on the western side of the river runs a long strip of parkland, bordered on its far edge by a big divided highway that parallels the river and is packed with traffic at all hours of the day. A simple, linear world - river, embankment, about a hundred yards of lawn and shrubbery, and highway.

This riverside park doesn't figure much in Warsaw criminal lore. You can usually find young mothers pushing strollers along the path, nuns out for a walk, or the occasional staggering drunk, all of them signs of safety and comfort. On this particular day, I was walking along with a backpack on, muttering to myself loudly, and headed to the Old Town not half a kilometer away. It was towards noon and the weather was stunning, but the park was almost empty.

At some point I noticed that a couple of young guys has started walking behind me on the path, your typical teenaged buzz-cut-and-track-suit types (Poland has yet to discover the mullet) who didn't seem very threatening. A little later, I noticed a second pair of young guys to my right, on a parallel sidewalk, and I recall feeling a tinge of uneasiness - there was a little too much in the way of fleeting looks and smirking from them, and I remember thinking that if the two pairs of guys were together, then I was in trouble. But this seemed like a paranoid thought, and I was just a few dozen steps from a very busy road, so rather than cutting sharply right to get nearer to traffic (which would have looked silly but spared me what happened next) I decided to just keep walking.

The sidewalk to my right tapered off into lawn, and the pair of guys walking there cut diagonally across to my own path, until they were walking just a few dozen steps ahead of me. And then they slowed down and started to look back at me, smiling. Not normal. ' "What's up?" said the smaller of the pair, a teenager with an overhanging forehead.

"Nothing's up"

I turned a sharp right, trying to get closer the road, which was obscured by some bushes. But they were clearly not intrested in lettimg me do that.

"Where are you going?"

"To the road"

"Why are you going to the road?" Right in my face now.

"For kicks"

My body had pumped so much adrenaline at this point that my overriding emotion wasn't fear, but rather an intense irritation that I was about to get my ass kicked by dorks. These guys had barely cleared seventeen, and I didn't relish the idea of losing my wallet and an entire goddamned iBook to them. But it wasn't clear how I could get myself away.

We had come to a stop when the guy to my left stuck his foot out in front of me and simultaneously reached for my arm, trying to pull me across his leg so that I would trip and fall onto the lawn. In hindsight, it seems suspiciously like the kind of kung-fu move I would have seen in a movie and rehearsed as a nine year old. To my very good fortune, he wasn't very quick in setting up his move, and i was able to see it coming, jumping over his foot and dragging him a few feet in the direction of the road.

At this point my assailant had me by the sleeve, in a tug of war, and his three friends were latching on. Some detached part of my brain noticed that this would be a good time to start yelling, so I did that.

We stood for a second in a state of what choreographers call dynamic tension, and then to my great relief I heard the ringleader in back yell "let him go, guys". He was chickening out. A few moments later I was trotting safely (this being a relative term) down the median of the divided highway, feeling great, flipping off my assailants with gusto. And only after walking for a few minutes, happy as can be, did it occur to me that I should call the police.

If you are ever, ever in Warsaw, I highly recommend you flag down a passing cop car and tell them you've been assaulted. You will meet with a kind of unconditional acceptance and emotional support that I didn't know could be found outside one's immediate family. The police will also go apeshit and run around with guns and screaming sirens in a way that very few families do, and for the police it's perfectly legal. I was lucky enough to flag down an entire van full of Warsaw's finest, and they immediately shouted for me to climb in and tell them which way to go. No invasive questions about who I was, no skepticism of any kind, not even questions about what had happened - just an instant desire to kick hooligan ass.

"I was assaulted by four guys just past that bridge!" I yelled when i got in the van. I barely had time to get my foot off the pavement before we were shooting down the highway in the wrong direction, sirens blaring, shotguns skittering around on the floor.

"MOTHERFUCKERS!" yelled the driver. "MOTHERFUCKING COCK FUCKING SONS OF MOTHERFUCKING BITCHES!"

There were six cops in the van with me, dressed in full black uniform and combat boots. There were various firearms and body armor piled on the floor, left over from the WTO summit the week before. The driver, whose name turned out to be Elmer, looked uncannily like Timothy McVeigh's kid brother. He did not look like he had seen a great deal of his twenties. A definite Type A personality, however.

"SONS OF FUCKING BITCH-ASS GODDAMNED COCK SUCKING GOAT FUCKERS!", he elaborated.

We were still heading the wrong direction, and whoever had designed the Warsaw highway system had not apparently heard of the U-Turn. I marvelled at the Polish system of signaling to drivers to make way, which was to wave a kind of giant plastic red lollipop out the window, moving it in complex patterns to convey instructions to the driver about which way to veer to avoid the careening cop car. The only signal I could make out was a kind of frenzied shaking, which seemed to mean "read my mind and get out of my way, MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER!!!!", judging by the running commentary.

Not surprisingly, most people's reaction at seeing a huge police van swerving wildly behind them was to hunker down and gradually go slower and slower. The papers were full of stories about an incident the week before in Poznan, where police had followed a car and then shot the driver dead without warning, only later figuring out that they had staked out the wrong apartment block. Just two days before my adventure, riot police in Lodz had mixed up live ammunition with rubber bullets used for crowd control; they had opened fire into a crowd of students, killing three people. 'Lie low , and hope to God they don't open fire' seemed a prudent strategy, so gradually the traffic around us started to crawl slower and slower.

Fortunately the van was not equipped with any kind of forward-mounted cannon, or Elmer would have surely started blowing little Skodas and Fiats out of the road in frustration. Instead he had to content himself with higher and higher flights of profanity, while the other cops and I held on for dear life. I hoped fervently none of the shotguns were loaded.

After finally, finally reaching a place to turn around, we raced back up the road and vaulted up onto the lawn a few hundred yards short of the place I had pointed out to them. I tried to repeat some minimal information about my assailants - four young guys, buzz cuts, nylon track suits - but the cops were out of the van and sprinting down the embankment before I could speak. I looked a little uneasily at the deserted van - door open, siren flashing, large shotguns spread enticingly on the floor - and then jogged down to the path to see where the hell everyone had gone. I could see two of the cops about fifty yards away: they had corralled a derelict with filthy long black hair, way past fifty years of age, clearly in need of a dark corner and a liver transplant. "IS THIS HIM?" they yelled.

"No, no - four young guys, short hair!"

They let him go and leapt back into the van, where the other cops had already materialized, and we were off with a screech.

"MOTHERFUCKERS!" said Elmer. "I'M GOING TO FUCKING TAKE DOWN THOSE MOTHERFUCKING SONS OF BITCHES!". He veered off the road after a hundred yards, stopping just short of a bridge, and the cops next to me shot out of the van again. "Is that them?" screamed one of the cops, pointing to invisible people up on the bridge. Incredibly enough, his partners seemed to be chasing two kids who were actually running away, though I couldn't be sure whether it was out of guilt or just a sudden prudent reluctance to interact with the Polish police.

A long few mintues passed before the two cops reappeared, breathing hard and shining with sweat. They had almost captured three fleeing suspects, but a recalcitrant taxi driver had foiled the capture by not instantly tearing off in hot pursuit when the cops had jumped into his cab and told him to drive. This was to be a persistent theme in the course of the afternoon - whether on foot or on the road, the common reaction among the citizens of Warsaw when approached by a pack of screaming cops was complete helpless terror.

We all piled into the van again and Elmer began a long series of manoeuvers that were designed to get us towards the Gdansk Station metro stop, which for mysterious reasons he had decided was the fleeing suspects' ultimate destination. We started the pursuit by racing up to the gates of the Citadel, an imposing old structure near the train station that now houses an army base. Before the sentries could level their arms at us, Elmer stopped and asked them if they had seen two (?) fleeing young guys. Negative.

We backed out at high speed, Elmer waving his lollipop while steering with one hand, and entered a maze of little streets. Suddenly one of the cops saw a group of three buff guys in their thirties, wearing track suits, standing and smoking by a wall. "IS THAT THEM??" he yelled, as Elmer peeled in to a tiny alley. Hands were on nightsticks, the cops made ready to shoot out of the van again.

"No no no no no!" I yelled, Young, younger than me! Buzz cuts! Not these guys!"

"MOTHERFUCKERS!" said Elmer. "NOW HOW THE FUCK DO WE GET OUT OF HERE?"

We were in a tiny courtyard, with cars parked randomly in every direction. There was no clear way out except the impossibly convoluted path we had taken to get in. We began a fifteen-point turn, the guys in track suits looking criminal and very amused.

It had now been over an hour since the assault, but if anything Elmer was more motivated than ever. He dropped two of his colleagues off on an overpass, where they scampered down towards Gdansk Station, and then began phase two of his containment plan, Operation Search Every Bus And Tram In Warsaw.

For the next thirty minutes, the cops would pull alongside a bus or tram, sirens blaring, and flag it down furiously with the lollipop. Then they would have the driver open the front door, and lead me through it to see if I could identify any of the passengers. It was hard to let them down, but the trams were filled with bewildered retirees, grade school students, businessmen, young nuns, and other implausible types. And I had the distinct impression that anyone I identified wouldn't have a very comfortable afternoon. Periodically, while we were searching one stopped vehicle, a second bus or tram might speed by and the cops would yell "did you see them in there? Were they in there?"

"MOTHERFUCKERS!" Elmer would add.

The only voice of sanity in the van seemed to come from the dispatcher, who was getting a little bit testy.

"We were flagged down by a man who claimed to have been assaulted near the Gdansk bridge. We moved out into the terrain and are conducting a penetration" Elmer would report.

"You have told me three times you are conducting a penetration," the voice would reply. "It has been ninety minutes, you have a minimal description of the suspects, and you have no leads to follow. Return to base, repeat, return to base"

"We are finishing our penetration of the terrain and have two men in the field," Elmer would say, undeterrable, "we will report as soon as we have terminated the penetration."

And then - "MOTHERFUCKERS! We're going to GET those motherfuckers!! GODDAMN! There - in that tram - is that them?!"

And so it came to pass that I found myself standing with three police officers on a very remote, very empty bridge on the far side of Warsaw. Elmer had left us on a tram and told us to rendezvous on the bridge, but something had obviously intervened and the van had now been gone a long time.

A very, very long time.

The cops were on their third cigarette and the conversation had turned to employment opportunities in Vermont (Chicago or Brooklyn might be a better choice, I thought). The swarthier officer had even gotten bored enough to ask me for identification, and jot down my name. His colleague was off in the distance, talking softly into his walkie-talkie. He didn't seem to be in a good mood when he got back.

"Is everything all right?" I asked him, as he lit up another cigarette.

"Elmer says he's got two suspects and is checking them out," he said. There was a bit of a tense silence after this: all three of the people who had actually seen the suspects were standing there on the bridge. I was quite sure I heard one of the cops sigh..

"So what are American women really like?"

Half a pack of cigarettes later, a call came in - we were to meet the van down at the foot of the bridge, right on the embankment road, and we would continue our pursuit. We walked down the steps to a deserted riverside road, and stood for a long while. There was no sign of a van. The swarthy cop began another quiet intimate conversation with the walkie-talkie.

"Elmer says he's waiting for us and can't see where we are," he said.

The thin cop didn't say anything, just pointed across the river. There, half a kilometer away, was a blue police van, parked in front of one of the bridge pylons.

"He's on the wrong fucking side of the water."

I thought this was a prudent time to ask if I could go, but a few minutes later I heard heavy footsteps and saw my cop friends walk up towards the tram stop where I was waiting. There was a lone black-clad figure visible on the tracks, on the far side of the bridge. Elmer. "We're going to take the tram over," said my friends. "You don't have a ticket, do you? Don't worry - we'll be your escort".

And that's how I happened to be dropped off by my house by a police van, sirens blaring, three hours after being attacked by thugs in a riverfront park. I waved to my new friends as passengers stared open-mouthed from the bus shelter where the cop van had stopped. I thought I recognized some of them from an earlier tram.

"We're sorry we couldn't get them, sir," said Elmer. "But we'll find them for you! Even if I have to go sit under that bridge on my motherfucking day off!"

I waved them all goodbye and made a mental note to stay the hell away from the river.

I was warned that it was utter madness to arrive in Warsaw on the last day of April, the day before Poland and nine other countries were slated to join the European Union. There was a meeting of the World Trade Organization under way, the city was filled to the gills with prime ministers, central bank heads and other luminaries, and fully half of the city center had been designated a "red zone", accessible to residents only, with no vehicle traffic allowed. Traffic gridlock surrounded the city, the airport was overwhelmed with clouds of black helicopters, every window within throwing distance of a Warsaw street had been boarded up in preparation for the "alternaglobalists" who follow WTO meetings like tie-dye artists used to follow the Dead. Anybody who could find the means had already left town - the capital was utterly deserted, menacing, bristling with police and furtive al-Qaeda operatives wrapped head to toe in plastic explosives. I was to understand that my father bore no responsibility for fetching me at the airport, none at all, that I would have to fend for myself, and God help me.

I arrived in Warsaw on a beautiful spring afternoon, the trees around the airport shockingly green in their new suit of leaves, a few bored soldiers standing guard and ignoring the meatheads who had managed to get themselves drunk on our two hour flight flight from London. A friend was already waiting for me in front of the terminal with car and driver, and we zoomed through the empty streets of Warsaw in style, not a single barricade or overturned burning bus in sight. My friend was wearing a wireless phone headset, giving him a secret service look, and I felt just like a prime minister.

Before dropping me off, my friend informed me that there would be a massive accession ceremony shortly before midnight, in case I wanted to watch. He also warned me, in familiar dire tones, that if I didn't buy groceries immediately, before the three-day weekend, I would surely perish of hunger. I washed my head, changed my shirt, laid in some supplies for MEATFEST 2004 ("Escape from Vermont"), and settled down at the television to wait for the magic hour when I could decently fall asleep. But the television tuned straight to the giant street party on Palace Square, a Euro-extravaganza under way about four hundred meters from where I was sitting. "Blogging is journalism", I thought, drank a half-liter can of Zywiec beer to help me blend in to the crowd, and stepped out into the night.

Palace Square is a telegenic, postcardy expanse right in the middle of the old city; a carpet of cobblestones with the recently rebuilt Royal Palace on one side, and King Sigmund standing on his column in the lonely middle. To cheer in the European Union, a massive blue sound stage had been erected along the north edge of the square. The platform had two huge projection screens on both sides, and was bracketed in every conceivable direction by cameras: cameras on cranes, cameras on rooftops, cameras on the silently hovering black helicopters. It is hard to correctly estimate the size of a crowd, I would estimate it at five thousand; certainly enough for a good turnout at a Middlebury hockey game. Fully three thousand of these were professional pickpockets, according to my usual sources - pickpockets who would strip me of my money, documents, and camera as soon as I set foot in the square, and I couldn't say I hadn't been warned.

The screens were projecting some impossibly overproduced television special, most of it in German, which periodically brought in a grinning, bespectacled Polish announcer who stood patiently at the front of our stage. He spoke sometimes in Polish, sometimes in the indeterminately accented World English that will one day take over the planet. The whole show was masterminded back in a German studio, where a tall blonde mistress of ceremonies cut between our own announcer and similar sound stages in seven other capitals (not a hint of Malta or Cyprus, unfortunately). I got a creepy Philip K. Dick watching her, waves of German flowing out from loudspeakers across the Old Town, but it didn't seem to faze the crowd. Once in a while, a Polish translation would kick in, making us appreciate its absence.

The announcer brought out Cold War relic Katarina Witt, who looked like she had just been removed from cryogenic storage deep in an East Berlin bunker. Witt confessed to an early crush on some Polish figure skater in the eighties, by way of illustrating why European expansion needed to happen. Our announcer gave a rubber grin and said, in English "But Katerina! While you were falling in love with a Polish ice skater, millions of Polish men were falling in love with you!" Her sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithm responded with a smile.

A string of other B-list eurocelebrities followed, each reading a short paragraph about What European Expansion Meant To Them, interspersed with live musical acts. The show featured some horrific sequencing - sugary pop previews of Eurovision contenders were interleaved with long, pompous performances of classical music. A Lithuanian opera star with a suspicious resemblance to Rosie O'Donell came close to breaking windows in the Old Town; a few moments later we were watching little figures on our own sound stage, humiliating our entire country with their English-language single "Sweet Sweet Love, I Want Sweet Love", a desperate cry for lyrical help.

When the classical pieces played, the cameras cut to boring, pan-and-zoom slide shows of the charms of the Eastern bloc: smiling peasants, glass skyscrapers intersperesed with squat Stalinist buildings, storks, dynamic businessmen on cell phones, beech forests, girls in folk costume.

The crowd bore up well. Everone seemed to be having an extremely sedate good time. I noticed a couple of signs reading "UE NIE" (No EU), but for the most part the mood was calm, happy, and somewhat bemused. A fire engine was parked at one end of the square, with firefighters sitting across the top, watching. Foreign camera crews moved frantically through the crowd, looking for anything that would offer a good visual. The had to queue up to film the few people who were carrying homemade signs. One woman held a banner reading "The End of Yalta"; another one carried a picket sign that said "Immortalize This Moment By Buying A T-Shirt". It looked political enough if you didn't speak the language.

Towards midnight, the music swelled, and the cameras on stage again cut to our announcer, who said:

"With only a few minutes left before midnight, we want to sing for you a Polish anthem that we hope will be an anthem for all of us in this historic new European Union. But we want everyone to sing along, so we will sing it in English!"

And then he pointed to a boy-band refugee on the stage behind him, who launched into the following song, which I have attempted to transcribe verbatim:

There's nothing you can do that can't be done
nothing you can sing that isn't sung
Nothing tra la la but you can learn don't play the game
It's easy...

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE etc.

There's nothing you can make that can't be made
Nothing you can see but isn't saved
Nothing la da dee but it can make how you feel inside
It's easy...

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE etc.

This performance mortified me on an unusual number of levels, so that it took a while before I noticed that the formerly sleepy crowd was now grooving, and singing along (at least to the chorus). Even the anti-EU sign guy seemed to swaying in time to the beat. I couldn't quite get over the shock of it - four hundred fifty million people were being asked to put their faith in the lyrics of a guy who thought Yoko Ono was hot. Lyrics that they could not even be bothered to look up before singing on transnational television. And it didn't help to know that the actual Polish anthem goes like this:

Poland has not yet perished
While we are still alive
What a foreign force has taken from us
We will take back by force

Which is a jauntier lyric, but admittedly not quite in the spirit of the evening. Despite a favorable mention of Italy, the anthem mainly dwells on the joys of unleashing whoop-ass on occupying powers, at least two of which are now fellow EU members. Still, "All you need is love" seemed like an unacceptably loose translation.

Being a cynic, I couldn't help making a little mental list of

Things the European Union Needs In Addition To Love

• A common foreign policy
• Consensus about the proper scope of federal rule
• A credible army
• Mandatory musical re-education camps
• A meaningful role for the European parliament
• Decent Mexican food
• Reductions in bureaucracy
• Agricultural reform
• Some degree of sovereign power
• A constitution
• 24 hour convenience stores
• Jobs
• An increase in the birth rate
• A sane immigration policy
• Deportation of all Eurovision contestants to karaoke bars in Central Asia
• Lower taxes
• Aircraft carriers
• Air conditioning

I had a strong suspicion that tonight's show was masterminded by the same genius who first juxtaposed slow-motion footage of the Berlin Wall coming down with the Scorpions' "Winds of Change". In the future, every momentous historical occasion will get a crap soundtrack.

At the end of the exercise, the clock counted down ("eight, four, five, three, two, one!", I kid you not) and suddenly we were in the European Union. A kind of strangled "yip!" rose into the night air, very anticlimactic. Imagine REO Speedwagon asking the Humboldt County State Fair if they are ready to rock and you have the sound Poland made on joining the European Union. Perhaps it was all the stress, and anticipation, and anxiety at finally having fifteen years' hard courtship consummated, or perhaps it was the rigid ban on outdoor drinking that night. But after an embarrassed silence, the firefighters saved the day by doing some funky loud things with their sirens, and the crowd worked itself into a proper frenzy of applause.

Part of my own motivation in coming out so late was that there might be indiscriminate kissing at the stroke of midnight, New Year's Style, but the ragged cheer dashed my hopes. The women in the crowd seemed very far from wanton abandon, and very near to their protective boyfriends and husbands, who stood behind them with arms extended protectively across their bellies in the international pose of "I am in a commited relationship and my little pumpkin is feeling chilly". But what the moment lacked in euphoric osculation, it made up for in quiet happiness. Fifteen years was a long time to wait, and it was still hard believe that this had truly happened. People were talking, smiling, drinking late-night coffee in shops, sneaking swigs of what I can only patriotically assume was cheap potato vodka out of plastic bottles.

As I wandered back home, the fireworks started over the Vistula, with more energetic cheering and hyperexcited kids running about to get a better view. I passed two men walking out of a restaurant, one looked at his watch and said to his friend "well, sir, as of five minutes ago we are Europeans".

It was a fantastic feeling. Not only did I now have both an American and a European passport, meaning I could have any Russian bride in the catalog, but it also meant that this silly but deeply beloved country was here for good, was here to stay. It would be come a normal, second-tier European nation, besieged by annoying backpackers and completely unremarkable. That may not sound like much of a national dream, but for Poland it is the culmination of two hundred years' bitter struggle. My own grandfather is older than modern Poland; being in Europe means we can now take the independence and continued existence of this country for granted, a remarkable luxury.