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 [...]
I saw this headline in Poland AM this morning and I thought, “Damn, they found me at last!”. Famous journalist faces prison for insulting President Prosecutors are investigating a morning radio show hosted by controversial journalists Kuba Wojewódzki and Michał Figurski, during which Figurski called President Lech Kaczyński a “small, retarded, stupid man”. The investigators [...]
Krakow’s Festival of Stick Leaning is an annual event rarely mentioned in the tourist guides. Each year, as winter reaches its peak, the head of every household braves the frigid night air to perform the Leaning of the Stick. The stick is taken down from its resting place, often above the family stove, and decorated [...]
Somewhat related to Pawel’s post below, is it not time for Poland to be considered for its own merits and not just lumped into the increasingly meaningless geographic lump of Central & Eastern Europe? I was just listening to Newshour on the BBC World Service where they were busy doom-mongering about Central & Eastern Europe. [...]
Whining about Polish customer service is a Polandian tradition, and what better time to indulge than our first birthday. My local shop, conveniently situated about 100 meters from the front door of my building, has a lot of points in its favor. It sells about 50 percent of the things one might normally need, the [...]
Extensive research, which bore an uncanny but misleading similarity to sitting in a pub talking nonsense, has enabled me to put together this startlingly accurate snapshot of the Polish nation this week. I’m guessing most people out there are familiar with the “If the world was a village with 100 people” meme, so I won’t [...]
Even us foreigners make New Years’ resolutions, but being a foreigner adds certain complications. Here are the top five New Years’ resolutions made by foreigners living in Poland and the reasons why they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of being kept. Lose weight Why you might want to do this? You’ve decided that [...]
Recently some moronic foreigners have been heard moaning about the feebleness of Polish winters these days. I won’t mention any names to save embarrassment. Fortunately the ill-informed rantings of these laughable fools have been silenced by what the locals like to call a ‘winter attack.’ Today I went outside and several important parts of my [...]
One of the arcane secrets of being an alien in Warsaw is knowing when to use Polish and when to switch to English. Both can be very effective, or not, when used at the right, or wrong, time. Take for example my recent trip to the Marriott hotel to order the Christmas turkey dinner. I [...]
I have the world’s worst internet connection. It costs me 50 zl a month and is slightly less reliable than a Nigerian oil millionaire who wants to use your bank account. Frankly it would be quicker to write Google searches on handmade parchment and post them to California. I can get quicker results by shouting [...]