We stop at the first place so Mimi can look at the menu that is posted on a stand. We stop at the second one, and Mimi looks at that menu. We stop at the third, and she looks at the menu there as well. Then we go back to the first restaurant, and Mimi looks at the menu again.

SHORTLY AFTER MY ADVENTURES with the swollen glands, I had an ultrasound on my bladder. I forget the reason for the test. I just remember the look on my doctor’s face.

“You have a growth on your pancreas,” my doctor told me. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

He didn’t say “pancreatic cancer.” He waited for me to raise the subject. I didn’t. So Mimi did.

“Is it cancer?”

The doctor got me an appointment with a specialist in Toronto. I didn’t want to go, but Mimi was insistent.

“Better to know,” she said.

“Why?”

“So we can plan.”

“For what?”

“The future.”

AS IT TURNS OUT, Mimi already has a recommendation for a restaurant that she got from the hotel, when I wasn’t looking.

“If you already had a restaurant in mind,” I ask her, “why are we wandering around looking at menus?”

Mimi is unfazed by my attempt at criticism. “Research,” she says. “We’re going to be in Prague for more than one night. And we’re going to eat more than one meal.”

Since we don’t know the public transit system, Mimi decides that we should walk to the restaurant.

“It’s right here,” she says, holding up the map in the guidebook.

“That’s halfway to Berlin.”

“It’s out of the tourist centre, but the walk will do us good. Shake the jet lag.”

I know objecting isn’t going to have much effect, but I object anyway. “That has to be a two-hour hike.”

“Not if we walk quickly.”

It takes us almost forty minutes to walk to the restaurant. It’s a small hole-in-the-wall, ten-table affair. There is no posted menu, and this makes the place feel oddly avant-garde. The interior is austere and feels somewhat martial, as though a squad of Russian soldiers left over from the 1968 invasion might be lurking in the kitchen.

There’s an old pommel horse in the middle of the restaurant. So maybe I’m mistaken. Not Russian soldiers. Russian gymnasts.

The restaurant is called Di Mateo, which sounds more Italian than Czech and, as it turns out, it is. I can see that Mimi isn’t all that happy about having found an Italian restaurant in Prague, whereas I’m delighted not to have to brave blood sausage and beet soup.

We’re seated in a quiet corner when I notice the first of three potential problems. The music playing in the restaurant is not traditional Czech, nor is it traditional Italian. It’s Johnny Rivers singing “Secret Agent Man.”