Poland – a pictorial quiz
1/ In a situation like this, is it best to stand or deliver?
While staying in a small country village I realise, to my great regret, that the traditional Easter soaking of Smingus Dyngus is far more rigorously enacted than it is in Warsaw when I find myself cornered by a vicious gang of six year olds.
2/ If one swallow maketh no summer, then how many storks maketh a spring?
Could Laurie Lee or John Constable have come up with a more evocative country scene? Not with storks they couldn’t. After all these years, and so many trips to Mazury region in April or May, the stork is now firmly established as my favourite Polish icon. Did I tell you I once met Laurie Lee? Visited his apartment in Chelsea after we’d filled it with soot because we were working on the chimneys he shared with our building site next door!!
On closer inspection. Quite a few of them around this year as far as we could tell.
3/ Do Poles have sweet teeth?
You can judge for yourselves by seeing the action inside and outside the cake & ice-cream shop in Łomianki @ Easter weekend. This was the biggest show in town.
4/ Knowing that this is a Polish road (difficult to believe being as it’s so flat), what’s missing from this picture?
a) Drunk on a bike
b) Hooker in fluorescent hot pants
c) Mushroom sellers
d) A deer about to hit your windscreen
e) All of the above
5/ Why?
In picture #4: You are missing someone illegally overtaking you. :)
Very true, Brad. Top marks!
There is a policeman behind the trees waving for you to stop.
In pic 4 what’s missing a bloody big lorry which you can’t overtake (or you are in fact driving one). I swear to you that 99.99999999999999recurring % of the time when approaching any bend in Poland there will be a lorry in front of you. Soon as you’ve passed the bend there will be oncoming traffic preventing you overtaking.
pic 5 is tricky as it’s either to avoid a soaking or to get some ice cream.
To get to the other side?
Hey, I met Laurie Lee too! He used to work with my old boss and came to the office once. Kept going on about this idiot who’d covered his flat in soot.
Why should not a chicken cross the road?
It would be a fowl proceeding.
number 3:
I love the charming neighbourhood. Wouldn’t you dream of spending a Sunday afternoon there? The bar next door serves hydraulika, lazienki, and ogrod… Yum!
I asked a philosopher of my acquaintance and he said:
“The question “Why did the chicken cross the road” is invalid. It is invalid because “why” assumes that the chicken had some reason for taking the action “cross the road”. This, in turn, assumes that the chicken has the concept of “road”; after all, if the chicken doesn’t know that the road is there, then the chicken did not – from the chicken’s point of view – cross the road, and consequently it is meaningless to ask for its motivations for doing so.”
Aaaaaaaah Glasshoppa – whether the chicken knew it was crossing a road or not is not the point – the point is why did the chicken go from point A to point B, which it is relatively safe to assume the chicken knew, whilst ‘the road’ is simply a human linguistic shortcut. The undeniable fact underlined in the question is that the chicken went from point A to point B and some purpose (instinctual or cognative) was responsible for the action. Hence ‘why?’ is a valid query and your philosopher friend should look for another profession.
There was, is, and always will be, only one answer to this question which encompasses both the geographical, in the sense points A and B on either sides of the road, the existential, in the sense of the chicken, and the metaphysical, in the sense of posited reality outside of human sense perception, and that answer is ‘Because it was there’.
Anyone wondering why I wrote ‘both’ and then gave three reasons should reread the meaning of metaphysical ;)
1) Hookers
2) A speed camera
3) Hairdrying smokey
4) Mushroom babcia
4,5) Too less traffic signs
5) Słupki hektometrowe
#1: Raincoat and wellies on Smingus Dyngus! Surely that’s illegal.
4.) Nothing is missing. The picture shows the road behind you, while everything is ahead of you (including the lorries you haven’t overtaken).
5.) Why do you guys assume the chicken is going anywhere? Maybe it simply practices step or aerobic?
Island1 – did I ever introduce you to my wife? She’s not one to be overjoyed at a wet daughter. “She’ll be sick for months!!”
“Smingus Dyngus”
Actually it’s “Śmigus Dyngus”