Myths about Poland
The Charles Crawford interview thing
It’s a little know but widely suspected fact that most influential figures connected with Poland start their day by reading Polandian. They’d be fools to do otherwise. We get endless emails from the Kaczyńskis and Tusks of this world begging to be allowed to voice their opinions to our trendsetting and remarkably handsome readership, but [...]
Myth 22: The kombinować myth
I may have mentioned once or twice before that Poles are immensely proud of their language. To the casual observer it’s by no means obvious why this should be so; nobody else in the world speaks it and those hapless fools who try often end up with bent vocal apparatus. It turns out that these [...]
Krakow’s lost river
Every city has it’s half-remembered legends of the way things used to be. Disappeared districts, demolished factories, buried rivers. As the decades pass a folk memory lives on, becoming vaguer with each generation. Spend some time in Krakow and sooner or later you will hear about the lost river. Everybody tells it differently and nobody [...]
Interesting things you didn’t know about Poland #1
According to the excellent blog Angels Do Speak!:
Did you know that Poland is the World’s Smallest Country (The Late Pope John Paul II is the First Polish Pope) and that Vatican City is the World’s Smallest State?
There are so many hilarious confusions going on here we can only assume it was written by an American. [...]
Myth #8: Polish water is safe to drink
The first thing us soft westerners ask when visiting a foreign country is “Can I drink the water?” In Poland the answer is far from simple, naturally. In fact Polish tap water is perfectly safe, but the social consequences of drinking it can be serious. I’ve been drinking the stuff for years and it’s never [...]
Myth #14: Polish is hard
Utter nonsense.
There are two reasons why this myth is so prevalent; number one because Polish looks hard to an English speaker and, number two, because Polish people are endlessly telling foreigners that it is hard. Let’s examine these two heinous misrepresentations more closely.
It looks hard
To a native speaker of English a word such as:
[...]
Myth #1: Polish people are rude
I’ve thought about this long and hard. Everybody I’ve ever met who’s been to Poland has wrestled with this question. And almost everybody thinks it’s kind of true and kind of not true. This is the current state of my understanding:
The truths
1. Polish people in shops, businesses, and government departments often appear rude to foreigners [...]
Myth #19: Polish people can drive
Of course I’ve seen them drive. A Polish person gets in a car, the engine starts, and the vehicle roars off into the distance in a cloud of blue smoke. They’re clearly pushing the right peddles and pulling the right levers. But that’s where it seems to end. As far as I’m concerned the real [...]
Myth #21: Polish girls are gorgeous
I realise I’m taking my life in my hands here but the truth must be told. Western men (heterosexual ones at least) visiting Poland for the first time tend to be blown away by Polish girls. Then they go home and tell all their friends that Poland is stuffed full of super-gorgeous babes and the [...]
Myth #34: Polish people eat swans
I kid you not. Most British people believe this. Ok, maybe not ‘most,’ but I never said I was going to be fair and impartial. This story pops up again and again in the more, shall we say, ‘creative’ parts of the British media. In other words, the parts that print the first thing that [...]
