In the spring when John Paul II died I visited my aunt and uncle and their daughter Marta in their home on the outskirts of Warsaw, and one evening after dinner I asked them a question that had nagged me for many years: how does one have a good time in Warsaw? Marta replied there was plenty to do. I told her I was not interested in Polish monuments or Soviet concrete or American stores. I wanted to see people moving around and enjoying themselves. My uncle told me I should try a different city, another country. Marta and Aunt Anna decided that what I really needed was a night of karaoke.

Twenty minutes later Marta started the car and opened the front gate. I climbed into the back seat, behind Aunt Anna. We rolled out of the driveway in Marta’s little Italian hatchback with a bent wheel well that made such a loud sound I could barely hear the neighbourhood dogs barking or the tires crunching over the gravel on the way to the main road. On the dark, paved road Marta pressed the gas pedal to the floor and the noise grew louder. Aunt Anna pushed herself harder into her seat, and I looked out the window at the trees going by along the side of the road, and a sign for Moscow pointing east.

At the first intersection Marta turned left onto a well-lit road lined with shoebox-shaped stores with neon signs. A few minutes later, as we drove into the old suburbs of Warsaw, Aunt Anna turned back to me and mouthed something like "Soviet concrete" and smiled and pointed out the window at concrete apartment towers thirty metres high. In the night, they looked like stacks of amber cubes.

At a red light, once we had crossed over the Vistula River, Aunt Anna pointed down a dark street and told me it led to Nowy Swiat, which translates as "New World." It is a famous old street with the finest shopping in the country.

The light turned green. Marta floored the gas pedal and Aunt Anna clenched her teeth and turned around and wedged herself back into her seat. She stayed that way until Marta parked the car in front of a grey three-storey building with an unmarked door beneath a red sign, and we all got out.

Marta opened the door and led us down a flight of stairs into a large, crowded room with photographs of famous singers and actors hung on the red brick walls. People were drinking beer at long wooden tables and a woman in front of a projection screen was singing into a microphone. We found seats at the back next to a young man in a CBGBT-shirt, and a young woman in a Ramones T-shirt. Marta handed me a song list, bound in black faux leather. I flipped through the collection of Polish songs whose lyrics I did not know and finally stopped at the American tunes that I recognized and picked one out. Marta went over to the emcee.

The young man in the CBGB T-shirt asked me where I was from. I told him I was born in Krakow but now lived in Vancouver. He told me I was unlucky because Vancouver was too rainy and too far from New York, and New York was the most interesting city in the world. Then he asked me what I was going to sing. "I Am I Said," I told him, and pointed at a photograph of Neil Diamond