Five photos, five countries, one thread running through them: the moments you actually remember from a trip are rarely the ones on the itinerary. A fisheye lens in a market square. A coffee that took twenty minutes longer than it should have. A gondola passing at exactly the right second. Here’s a quick lap around the continent through five of them. Wrocław, Poland Market Square, shot wide enough that the whole thing curves.

Everybody photographs the statue. Almost nobody comes home with a photograph worth keeping. It sits in a stone niche at the corner of two narrow streets, roughly knee height on an adult, behind a wrought-iron grille that throws black scrollwork across every clean angle you might want. Point a camera at it straight on and you get a small dark bronze against wet grey limestone, correctly exposed and completely dead.