Do we have TV in Poland?

Recently a had a pleasure to chat with a very interesting middle class type ( maybe yuppie type :) ) Yorkshire man about us the Poles. The guy was not a typical The Sun Reader ( or who knows, what is his passion) but definitely he was well dressed man, actually very well dressed man. Couple questions from him just for starter strike me alot and I had no simple quick answer to them, like do we have a TV in Poland? ( no, he was not mocking me, really he was serious about that ) or where we actually are on the map of the Europe?. I am not bother with that sort of question any more but because this guy seems to belong to the better part of British society, work on very responsible position in very well known company ( in my city ) I am just wonder who we have to be worry about these days? I mean we, the Poles!?

Look on the bright side: he heard about Europe, and he even knew there are maps.

When you really think about such questions then know this - people's statements often say more about them than about those they describe.

he's an ignorant...


and that's what scares me....
;)

can you elaborate more about that?

only fools ask stupid questions, and that's what that person asked.

I can sort of understand this, but the TV thing is a bit bizarre.
I grew up in the 1970s in the UK when the cold war was at it's highest and in our schools I remember almost nothing being taught about Poland. There were a couple of things however, that I do remember and that was the map of Europe...all the Eastern side of Europe was marked in red, which represented the Soviet Union as it was then and we were taught that this was Russian territory.

A lot of this propagandized information still exists today, and living in Poland as I do and being British it makes me cringe when I hear this sort of thing.

For instance, when I moved here my brother-in-law in the UK who is a top Policeman in the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard said to me, "so you are moving to the land of the midnight sun then".

I had another guy telling me that Poland was a country of ice and snow, it goes on and on.

Still the worst one I heard was from an American who told me when I was in Boston that Poland was part of Europe which was in France, and he was serous. ;0)

Do a fools work on responcible positions? nah, that couldn't be true, do they can spread nonsense about other nations ( particulary Poles in UK ) ? no, that is not possible. You are right, no worries about.

it happens often... i've met a few...

Yes.

I know plenty of educated people who have never visited Poland - they are always asking whether my friends in Poland beg me to take them to MacDonalds <sigh>


Sounds like they are confusing Poland with Scandinavia.

Poland has an image problem amongst the UK illiterate. I had the following conversation in London with an English guy 2 years ago. . .

'Why do you want to move somewhere so cold?'

What do you mean?

' I mean they don't call it Poland for nothing you know!'

eh?

'Well they got the north Pole there don't they! Don't they?!'

Well, yes of course they do

nothing about polar bears anymore :(((

No, that is not fair at all. People have a right to be honest and if they do not know something then they have a right to ask and learn from that experience. Many years ago, I was in South Africa and drove in to the countryside and stopped my car by some little wattle huts to take a photograph. I was surrounded by men who asked me where I came from. I said that I am from London. Blank faces. "You know, where Buckingham Palace is" I added. Still blank faces. You can speak the same language but there has to be conceptulisation. I was driving through Germany in the late 1970's along the motorways in my old Volkswagen car and I kept seeing arrows with the word langsam and I thought to myself, God, it must be a big town for the same direction to be continually shown for miles and miles! It is embarasing for me to admit it now with hindsight but I also remember being in Moscow when the Americans invaded the Island of Granada. The Russian media on the television showed a map of mainland Spain with the town iof Granada which is also there!

I have had many similar questions to me.
It's easy to be defensive and say how awful people are to not know about poland and how it is like. But one of my friends put it in a simple way for me once. He said 'I have an image of poland being not very nice at all' to which I questioned why, and he said 'Why have some many poles come to the uk?, It is not great here, so it must be awful there'. This thought process makes a little more sense after this conversation with him.

I have had loads of these questions from every country I have been to (including Poland).
When I first came to Poland, a woman told me that people in my country still think that Poland is communist, I replied "possibly, some uneducated people might think that, not much information has been getting through, it is like some Polish people think Ireland is under british rule" she replied "you are" I had to show her my Irish passport to convince her otherwise, I met a Welsh guy recently who thought the same thing.

I am most shocked about English people not knowing anything abuot Ireland, we are next door neighbours but there you go :/
But as for Ireland being a tiny Island in the Atlantic, I am also surprised how much people know about it.

I've noticed that a lot of Europeans like to make fun of Americans because of their limited knowledge about geography. Truth be told we are not any better than they are. Just as SeanBM wrote, no country is free of ignorance. Ask any Pole what he knows about Moldova for example. Hell, why go that far, ask him about Baltic states, I doubt he knows much.

A very big proportion of British people I had the chance to meet had problems with pointing out exact location of Poland on a map. The things are slowly changing though. I bet that if Borat was made 20 years ago, he wouldn't be Kazakh, but most probably a Pole, Slovak or Lithuanian. We are slowly getting to know each other more.

People can say what they want about the E.U. but it is a fantastic time in Europe, we are all finally meeting each other at long last :)

Yeah. If we were to meet in the mid-way between Kraków and Glasgow it would be somewhere in Hamburg.

I have some critical thoughts about the EU, but on the whole I would say "Well done Europe". :)

Speaking of misconceptions: I remember up to an early 1980's we Poles used to call all Soviet Unions citizens Russians. We now know better.

I was told by a greek taxi driver that Czechs wear skirts.
Generally communist states were depicted in western media as places of extreme poverty and lack of essential goods.People starving and technology of the pre-war period.So many people thought TVs,videos,even photoaparats and lighters did not exist in eastern block.

I remember a stand-up comedian telling a story like this:''Friends,I went to Poland this year with 5 dollars.I bought a dozen of jeans and a car.People there are starving.With one Kolynos(toothpaste brand) you get a girlfriend.''

Talk about misconceptions, the first 4 minutes of this are funny (don't bother with the rest, I would think there are people who have this conception of central eastern Europe, tahts my street :)

"It is good you came in summer, in winter it can get verrrrrry depressing"

I don't...

Actually, that is not really true. If you look at a map of Ireland and compare it to England, you will not find a great deal of difference in actual size. To call Ireland a small island in the middle of the Atlantic is quite false.

No it is not, look at Russia and get back to me :)

They made maps a bit differently in Michal's day

Generally there was a tendency to downplay all avhievements in the East.See for example how they presented the Olympic Games to get an idea.

Michal, are you expecting the same kind of knowledge from a supposedly educated, Brit as you do from people in Africa where, in some countries, they have to make a daily choice - shoes for a kid to walk to school or a meal for the family?

ah... Michal and his fairy tales....