Here’s a cool and non-controversial thingy: maps of Warsaw and Krakow superimposed with visualizations of where people take photos. They were created by a chap called Eric Fischer, along with a lot of similar maps of other cities that you can see on his flickr page. Using location data added to photos on Flickr and [...]
Island1, known to the authorities as Jamie Stokes, has been interviewed about his experience of living in Poland by the nice lady at Seen the Elephant. Little is known about the views of the shadowy Mr Stokes, apart from the thousands of words of poorly considered nonsense he posts on Polandian every month. This is [...]
The supernatural world was riven this week by news that Jesus, youngest son of Yahweh, has begun construction of a 300,000 square kilometre country to be called Poland in the centre of the European continent. Stretching a thousand kilometres from end to end, Poland will be the largest country called Poland ever built. “The plan,” [...]
I don’t often talk about my other writing outlets on Polandian because I assume everyone knows how wildly famous and loved I am already—they’re just too polite to mention it. This is also my working theory for why people never ask for my autograph on the street and why strangers never buy me drinks in [...]
This TEDx thing doesn’t look hard. I watched TEDxKrakow yesterday and I reckon we could do just as well. The first thing you need is a theme. The theme of TEDxKrakow was “Texting the Dragon,” which was supposed to inspire speakers to: “show how Krakow (and Poland) can be modern and progressive in the context [...]
Eighteen people killed in a minibus—several million wondering if they will be next. Anyone who has been on one of these rattling deathtraps has been expecting this. There are tens of thousands of them on Poland’s roads, most of them operated by tiny companies and almost all of them alarmingly substandard. The thousands of minibus [...]
I’ve been following the planning and building of Krakow’s new pedestrian bridge for what seems like most of my life but has in fact only been two years. Today was the culmination: in glorious Autumn sunshine I made my first crossing, the bridge itself having inconveniently been opened in the middle of last week. My [...]
The Ice Road is a remarkable book both because it tells a little-known but important story of human suffering and because it does so in a way that doesn’t leave you wanting to slit your wrists. It is the autobiographical tale of 14-year-old Polish boy Stefan Waydenfeld and his family who were exiled to Siberia [...]
I’m not dead, I’ve merely moved to Krowodrza. It’s similar to being dead, but the rents are higher and Internet access is less reliable. Although I am now just a few tens of metres beyond Aleje, this is enough to make me a suburban person. Us suburban people do not have access to 24-hours shops [...]
Polandian’s much-loved caption competition is back! To be honest, the reason I stopped doing them was because so many prominent Poles were killed in the Smolensk disaster that for a long time I couldn’t be sure the people in the pictures I had chosen weren’t tragically dead. At least one of the people who appeared [...]