Maybe it is the cold weather here in Warsaw and the fact I was walking from a modern warm coffee shop in Centrum to the area of the US Embassy to view yet another statue of former US President Ronald Reagan unveiled on November 22nd (I was at unveiling of another in Budapest in June). [...]
Poland’s health system is quite often praised, thanks to the quality of staff involved and the costs involved – especially when compared to many other national health systems. However, it appears that the Polish system has a high standard as it is required to heal all the many illnesses in Poles, as opposed to helping [...]
There are some very interesting articles on Wikipedia nowadays, and as long as you are willing to remember that they are written and maintained by ‘amateurs’ who sometimes can inject a touch of bias, then it can easy to while away a few hours learning something new or refreshing your knowledge on a topic there. [...]
It is a generally accepted theory that there are a few stages involved in being an emigrant (moving from your own country) or immigrant (in moving into another). The main five stages are summarised below: Honeymoon phase – The “Oh my god, I’ve never seen one of those” phase where everything is great, even the [...]
There may be some criticism coming over the construction efforts of the stadia and infrastructure in preparation for the Euro 2012 football championships next summer, with disputes ranging from the likelihood of stadia to be ready in Ukraine to workers preparing new motorways not being paid. However, a positive for the Polish preparations at least [...]
Experiments are what moves the humanity forward, but the particular one carried out in Poland over the past weekend turned out to be a flop… Predictably. The originator of the venture called “A weekend without causualties“* was the National Roads and Motorways Authority. The end was noble and maybe for that reason it justified peculiar [...]
My faktura for Zosia’s phone arrived the other day. She who must be obeyed had retrieved it from the postbox sometime earlier and I moved it from the dining room table to the terrace for a read. This was purely for intellectual purposes as it was already paid after more detective work had found the [...]
With the smoking ban in Poland having been in place approximately 7 months (since November 15th 2010), it’s an interesting time to consider smoking in Poland and whether the ban has made a difference, and the attitudes to smoking in general. What was most interesting to note was that the introduction of the smoking ban [...]
“We’re on a road to nowhere, come on inside, takin’ that ride to nowhere, we’ll take that ride” Talking Heads “Road to Nowhere” If you were to take a drive in an easterly direction from Krakow city centre, towards Nowa Huta, and travel on Aleja Pokoju, you would find one of Krakow’s newest roads. It [...]
In China, they have the year of the tiger, monkey, rat and so on. This year in Poland seems to be the year of the anniversary. Whether going shopping, watching television or just living life, it’s not difficult to notice advertising, and a footnote to many advertisements at the moment seems to be that the [...]