Life / Can you keep a right hand drive car in Poland? [57]

No, no proof of address required. There's no zemeldowanie or anything like that in the UK :-) Yes you just need to use a UK address.

If you register the car with the registered keeper as a company then you can even use a post box address.

Life / Can you keep a right hand drive car in Poland? [57]

Yeah the UK route could be the least hassle. But once the vehicle is over 3 years old you will have to return to the UK each year for a new vehicle inspection. Also fully comp insurance to cover you in Poland will not be cheap. UK insurance is outrageously expensive plus most policies only give you 90 days of fully comp cover outside the UK per year. Inkrakow has some contacts I believe.

Life / Can you keep a right hand drive car in Poland? [57]


When I was living in Oz I remember I had to return to the state from where my car was registered in order to do the annual inspection. Can't remember if that was NSW or Queensland though. Is there really no inspection Australia wide or is it different state by state?

Life / Joined the army for your compulsory service - calling back for training in Poland? [5]

I heard Tusk say on the news last week that they were planning on dropping National Service in Poland soon, so I guess you won't have to worry about it much more.

Defence Minister of Poland says that from October next year in the barracks of the Polish army soldiers will no longer compulsory military service.

This is to introduce from January 1, 2010 in Poland, fully professional army.

The Minister informed that, in accordance with the decision of the Prime Minister this year's collection is the collection of the last and the final incarnation as part of this collection will be held in December.

Life / Can you keep a right hand drive car in Poland? [57]

Not sure how that would work - are you going to take the vehicle back to Oz every year for your technical inspection? Or do you not need one?

Food / Polish meat shops in Wroclaw, Poland [6]

My in-laws often buy a pig or calf from some of their farmer relatives. This is probably the more common way and most likely the cheapest.

Feedback / Mods: why is my request removed each time? [36]


Not manually, that's fair enough. But I presume you have a tool to move these threads, in which case I am going to guess that it's just a little bit of PHP code needed so that the author of a thread is automatically notified if a thread is moved/deleted/whatever.

But whether someone has the time/coding know-how/effort to do that is a different matter :-)

Law / American wishing to obtain dual citizenship [16]

this stuff is asked all the time - use the search box and have a read....

if you have one ancestor born in Poland after 1923 who didn't lose their citizenship for some reason then probably yes.

Language / Cases, Genders, Nominative, Instrumental...WHY? [40]

I always say that it could be worse - at least they use the same alphabet as us!

Language / Cases, Genders, Nominative, Instrumental...WHY? [40]


You could say polish distinguishes between 5 so that beats the Abos - masculine (subdividing between virile and non-virile, in turn non-virile can be animate or non-animate), fem, neuter.

Life / Present for Polish friends ~ is anything hard to get any more? [57]

There are tescos here in Poland but they are not like the UK tescos. They don't stock the same things either. They are still quite new here so probably not in every town, but most town will have at least one of the main supermarkets here such as Lidl, Carrefour, Tesco, Biedronka and so on...

UK, Ireland / Taking a UK-registered car to Poland [35]

you would only need to change it over to LHD if you wanted to register the car in Poland. As you are only bringing the car over temporarily then I don't see why you would need to do anything like that. Keep your Irish plates, Irish vehicle inspection and Irish insurance. That is probably the simplest route. Just make sure your documents don't expire whilst you are abroad, as you will need to be in Ireland to get your vehicle inspection done.

Life / The trials and tribulations of trying to obtain a Polish driving license [26]

What I should have said was "revoke" rather than "confiscate". Interesting what you say above - I trust that is how it works but I can't find any information about it whatsoever.

But (slightly alarmingly) I did find this:


driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/news/individual%20news%20articles/x_040501_driving-on-european-continent.htm

Law / American wishing to obtain dual citizenship [16]

Yes you can have dual citizenship, there is nothing to forbid it (but for some reason I hear this mistake all the time from Polish people that it's not allowed). However Poland does not RECOGNISE dual citizenship. Therefore in Poland you are purely Polish in the eyes of the Polish authorities. Abroad you take the nationality of whichever passport you are travelling on.

Language / Polish Language Exams [4]

Details of the European framework thingy: british-in-poland.blogspot/2008/03/polish-exams-for-foreigners.html

Language / Verb patterns 'BYC' [29]

No it is a little bit irregular. You will often notice that words used the most often tend to be the most irregular (and not just in Polish)

Language / Help with Sentence Structure! [16]

just realised I can't even spell - should be szkoła of course...

Language / Help with Sentence Structure! [16]

I think someone like Krzystof posted about this exact topic a while ago. I remember reading it but I can't find it using the search tool...

My understanding is that it's Adj-No like in English a lot of the time, but No-Adj when the adjective limits the noun. E.g.:

letnia skoła - here the adjective says something to describe the school - it is "summery". So a "summery school" (which doesn't make sense, I am just using this as an example).

skoła letnia - here the adjective quantifies/restricts the school. It says something about the type of school - i.e. it is a school only open in the summers, a summer type of school. Thus "summer school".

Life / The trials and tribulations of trying to obtain a Polish driving license [26]

I don't think they are that organised. They can't confiscate your licence because they didn't issue it, the DVLA did. They can only ban you from driving in their country. Given that I don't drink drive or do anything too stupid I hope that will never occur. It's just the odd speeding ticket here and there that would worry me if I was able to accrue points here....

At that time I didn't have my karta pobytu and I don't think I was even carrying my passport (I don't normally). He just took UK address (which is old - sold up and move out a year ago) from my driving licence and seemed happy with that.

Life / The trials and tribulations of trying to obtain a Polish driving license [26]

OK that makes sense in your scenario then, fair enough. Yes I can get banned by the Polish police but I don't pick up penalty points. For example I got stopped for speeding a couple of months ago and the penalty was 2 points and 100 zloty (if I recall correctly). I paid the fine and didn't get the points. So I think that for most of us it's better to keep a foreign licence.

Language / Verb forms and conjugation [28]

One of my text books says there are 11 patterns if you want to get technical about it, but effectively 4 with the odd variation. Not at home right now so can't quote which book it was. Off the top of my head though:

The "a" pattern:
Czytać - czytam, czytasz, czyta

The "i" pattern:
myśleć - myślę, myślisz, myśli

The "e" pattern:
Iść - idę, idziesz, idzie

The "y" pattern:
Słyszeć, słyszę, słyszysz, słyszy

Life / The trials and tribulations of trying to obtain a Polish driving license [26]

Just out of curiosity ukpolska, why did you want a Polish licence? Given that there is no requirement to exchange them I will keep my British one and enjoy the bonus of not picking up Polish penalty points....

Language / Swojego vs swego, and friends [6]

you also see these short forms in religious text too...

UK, Ireland / Sending from Poland to UK - quick cheap and secure? [8]

There are some smaller couriers you could try. I paid about £50 for some large and heavy boxes to be sent to me from London. Took a about 7 working days.

The cheapest (if this equipment isn't too valuable) would probably just be to bubble-wrap it really well and send it via Royal Mail. Recorded delivery is of course safest but slower than regular post (at least on the Polish side).

Dunno if that helps you or not though...

Life / The Polish Flag Is White, with red tape! [32]

look at the bright side of all this bureaucracy - they problably don't have "identity theft" like we do back in the UK... :-)

Travel / Other than Krakow or Warsaw, which cities should I visit? [18]

I really liked Gdansk.

Love / Getting Engaged to Polish girl, asking permission from her dad? [19]

Brilliant move. I am sure they will really appreciate it. Good to have your future out-laws on side from the start too.

UK, Ireland / Free sms's to O2 in Scotland?? [3]

I spent a lot of time looking this stuff up because I needed it for a website I worked on that had to send out text messages - basically you are after an "SMS gateway service".

Unfortunately in the UK the mobile companies don't offer this service. I am sure they did 10 years ago but it seems that they don't now. There are services and websites that you can use but you have to pay to send messages. Have a google for SMS gateway and you will find a few of them I am sure.

Life / The Polish Flag Is White, with red tape! [32]


You can't get a UK MOT in Poland. You can get an Polish inspection done but it's only valid on Polish territory. Without a UK MOT your UK insurance is invalid, plus you won't be able to get your tax disc either.

The only solution is to take the vehicle back to the UK once a year and get it done back there, unless you happen to know a dodgy UK mechanic who will issue you a cert without seeing the vehicle...