The “Hello, Dolly!” folks are from Brussels. They finish off the Jerry Herman hit with a flurry and give way to an assault by an Israeli ensemble and the overture from Oklahoma! A band from Italy waits its turn in the shade of the bridge. The Italians have fashioned their instruments to mimic kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures.

One guy has a French horn that looks like a toilet.

MY HEALTH PROBLEMS began with a thyroid that went south. When I came home with the news, Mimi told me that thyroid problems are generally a female thing and that this was a sign of my strong feminine side.

Gout was next, followed by swollen saliva glands in my neck. Gout was chronic but could be controlled by medication. The swollen glands were more disturbing, and just to be safe, my family doctor sent me to a specialist, a young woman who didn’t look old enough to have been admitted to medical school.

“We’ll need to do a fibre-optic laryngoscopy.” She opened a drawer and took out a coil of tubing. On one end was a small probe. The other end was attached to a device that looked vaguely like a pistol with a video screen.

“This is an ENT scope.”

“You want to put that down my throat?”

“Actually,” she said, “the cable goes in through your nose.”

“My nose?”

“We use an anaesthetic spray.”

“You want to put that in my nose?”

“You’ll hardly feel a thing.”

SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE and it’s late afternoon and Mimi has had her fill of show tunes. We wander the food stands, check out the offerings to see if there is anything we recognize. Mimi takes a long look at something called trdelnik.

“You think this is the Czech version of fry bread?”

And when we run out of park and bands and food, Mimi consults the map. I can see adventure sparkling in her eyes. I can hear determination lurking in her voice.

“Why don’t we explore the river,” says Mimi. “See what we can find.”

What we find are several giant bronze babies frozen in mid-crawl. I take a picture of Mimi standing next to one of the babies, and I take a picture of Mimi trying to plank on a giant baby’s butt.

“See,” says Mimi. “This is why we travel.”

“They don’t have faces.”

“It’s probably symbolic. I’ll bet it has to do with television and the angst of modern existence.”

Farther along, we come upon a row of yellow penguins standing in a line on a platform in the river. Mimi consults the guidebook.

“They’re made out of recycled bottles. It’s supposed to be a comment on global warming.”

“Yellow penguins?”

“Thirty-four yellow penguins.”