Food / What's your favorite Polish beer? [870]

Tried it once years ago...in Lublin (of all places!), but can't righjtly recall the taste.. I like their current TV slogan: 'Najbardziej lubelskie piwo śwata' ('the world's most Lublinian beer!'). Is it still an independent bvrewery or is it owned by one of the internatioanl biggies: Carsberg, Heineken, SAB, etc.?

Unrelated, but yesty I heard on Discovery or suchlike that 99% of the world's beer is pilsner (lager). Exaggeration or round figure?

Life / Polish Hiphop priest, Father Jakub Bartczak, releases video [9]

DId you know that the world's first rock'n'roll mass was created in Poland in the 1960s and released on the Muza label. It was called 'Msza beatowa'. Early Polish rock'n'roll was known as 'Big Beat'.

Life / Polish Hiphop priest, Father Jakub Bartczak, releases video [9]

Catholicism is the original Christian faith from which the Eastern Orhtodox split off. All the later breakaway sects, Protestants, Jehovah's Witnersses, Mormons, etc. are the ones whose Chrsitianity may be questioned. But in this age of Ecumenism the challenge posed by the dissolute, hedonistic and hopelessly materialsitic world is drawing them all together.

News / There's still hope for Poland! [19]

Not for long. A consrtuctive vote of no-confidence is just round the corenr. Shifty-eyed tricky Don will end up on the trash heap of history. Oby jak najszybciej!

Love / Chastity rings in Poland - bad news for 'dziwkarze' [42]


The Decalogue was divinely inspired. And whenever it was followed, things went well; when it was ingored, all hell broke loose. Wouldn't it be great and more economical (less money wasted on locks, ararm systems, lie detectors and lawyers) if fewer people stole, lied, badmouthed their parents and cheated on theri spouses?

News / There's still hope for Poland! [19]

The goods news is PO down to 28%. Poles seem to be wisening up and seeing through the Tuskite oldboy 'układ': tinhorn politicans, shady business, servile jmedia and gangsters.

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

In Poland there are times when a nalewka or other strong drink is served at a festive company breakfast ...was how I started this thread and later gave Polonian-Polish reunions as a for instance. The Polonians I had in mind were the descendants of the old 'za chlebem' immigration -- the third, foruth, fifth and even sixth generation of the original immigrants. All born in the USA, most no longer speak Polish or know very little, and many have become thoroughly 'Ameircanised' to where they show little interest in seeing Poland. But those that commented on how Polish realtivres tried to 'wine and dine' them to death with that never-take-no-for-an-answer polska gościnność were the ones who actually made that once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to the ancestral Ojczyzna. These people cannot be compared to the DP generation in the UK, nor the post-Solidarity one.

They are in a class by themselves.

Love / Chastity rings in Poland - bad news for 'dziwkarze' [42]

Only illicit sex is sinful and filthy.

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

I've only driven cars and have no experience in the donkey department. Ask Jon 537 - he's on top of all these trendy things.

Love / Chastity rings in Poland - bad news for 'dziwkarze' [42]

What about talking gullible kids into self-mutilation inlcuding lip-rings, tongue-studs and penis-piercing or those numbskull tattoos. That's a clerver marketing gimmick if I ever saw one and doubly pricey. They charge through the nose to to have tatoos removed - with limited success because usually some scar or blotch remains.

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

No graves or ancestral homesteads in gated estates! If it turns out that no-one lives at the old place anymore, many Polonians will go out of their way to be driven there, take pictrues or camcord what's left of the old family farm and crumbling gravestones. You see, these people were peasants but they had spirit. They did not believe if you can't eat. drink, wear, drive or shag it, it ain't no damn good.

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

No. I'd like to hear your take on it. Is it a famring village or mainly chłopo-robotnicy who work in towns and have a few chickens running about? Do they have anyone to leave their farms to? Young male farm heirs have a hard time finding wives. Many rural girls flee the drudgery of farm work and prefer to 'malować pazury', work at a nice, clłean desk job and sip capuccino in big-city cafés. But that's just my impression. As an honest-to-goodness wieśniak you can provide a first-hand account.

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

20-.25 years is usually reagrded as a generation, so this is the first generation faced with consumer abundance. No ration cards, emtpy meat-shop hooks, etc. The downside is that many are living high on the hog on credit, as if not realisinn that e'ventially has to be repaid WITH HEFTY INTEREST..

News / Characterizing Poland's political parties [33]

The problem with 2 parties is that usually neither is capcious enough to suit all voters. Before the once ‘solid south’ abandoned the Democratic Party (who embarked on a socially leftist-libertine agenda - McGovern & Co.), there used to be something called Dixiecrats (southern Democrats) who were socially conservative and strong on states rights as opposed to excessive federal (central government) cotrol. Also the Republicans had a liberal (Rockefeller et consortes) wing. PO is also a rather absorptive party with different wings. Whether and for how long Tusk will manage to keep it together before it starts becoming unravelled and unglued remains to be seen. I know next to nothing about British politics, so maybe someone can fill me on on whether Labour and Tories also have different wings in their structures?

News / 1.3% birth rate = Poland's slow death [221]

Woman tractor drivers were a Stalinist propaganda ploy, but people were so underpaid in PRL and CCCP that one pay packet was not enough to even get by.

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

sa11y
I have come and seen many times. And seen what the people of Poland gradually becoming technical titans and...moral midgets. You can call it the Czech syndrome. If you put it in a fancy, shimmering package people will buy even 'hovno'. The difference is that back in the early 1990s the Czechs added: 'And the writing should be in German' (they have since graduated to the English master tongue). Since people in Polonia see all this fancy-shmancy commercialism and glitter at first hand on a daily basis, they do not react like Poles to whom this is a first generation revelation and act like 'burek spuszczony ze smyczy'. And the old family farmsetad and graves are not in the big cities or the UK, but in Wólka Plebańska, Brzeziny, Mikołajów and thousands of other such rural hamlets and villages.

BTW I did not say 'snotty' (which means cheeky), but 'snooty' (stuck-up, snobbish, condescending, looking down on one's fellow man).

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

Have you recently visited the remote rural areas of Podlasie, Lubelszczyzna or Podkarpacie? Believe it or not, people tehre still keep chickens and pigs on theri small farms rather than dashing down to their nearest Tesco for pork chops or eggs.

A couple simialr to the hypothetical one I mentioned this summer visited long-lost relatives in Popowo Kościelno and were treated the way I described -- like royaltry. They couldnt' speak much Polish but a grandson of their Polish cousins was learning English at school and with a dictionary they were able to communicate. One of the cousins took them to Warsaw in his Tico and showed them Arcardia like it was the 7th wonder ofthe world, but they only said: 'We've got places like that in America.' What they really enjoyed was a musuem of old farm implements in Ciechanowiec or Ciechanów (one of those) - they felt it was part of their ancestors heritage and that's what they were after. They also preferred their cousins' home-made studzienina, salceson and kaszanka (comfort foods remembered from childhood) than some fancy-shmancy downtown Warsaw gourmet restaurant.

À chacun son goût!

News / Characterizing Poland's political parties [33]

Would Poland be better off with a different configure such as that of other countries -- more bipolar: Democrat/Republican (USA), Christian Democrat/Social Democrat (Germany) Conservative/Labour (Britain)?

The downside of having only two main parties (in the US at least) is that many people don't have anyone they can fully identify with to vote for. For instance many PolAms support Romney's conservative social agenda but not his pro-corporate stance. Other Polonians like Obama's pro-working class approach but not his libertine (PC, pro-abortion, pro-gay, pro-feminist and anti-clerical) agenda.

On the other hand, political diversity can also be overdone. The first freely elected Sejm had 29 different parties in it, including some joke groupings like the Beer Lovers Party.

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

You really don’t know a bloody thing about American Polonia, even though I have tried to explain it so łopatologically as possible so even a moron could grasp it.

Think of a retired couple in Buffalo, Greenpoint, Cleveland or Chicago. He may have worked in a steel mill or car factory, she may have been a housewife. The house is finally paid for; the five kids have been off on their own for some time. A few bucks (dollars) have been set aside for the one big trip abroad. Of course, some may choose the Caribbean, Britain, France or other such stereotypical tourist haunts, but our discussion focuses on a couple that

has decided to visit their ancestral homeland. Since more likely than not they are US-born, it's actually a visit to the country of their parents or grandparents. All they may know is some family stories and a few faded snapshots. To expect a royal reception, they would have had to have touched base with their long-lost relatives ahead of their trip by corresponding. They may speak only halting Polish or nothing at all. They sign up with a PolAm tour group which gives takes them on a guided coach tour of Poland’s major tourist destinations but also provides free time to make contact with families in Poland. The old Polonia from which our hypothetical couple was descended was entirely rural and hailed from tiny villages in the three partitions, so they will invariably want to visit the old family homestead and family graves. Maybe see the church their great-grandparents were married in. Their Polish relatives will probably butcher a pig, maybe whitewash the fence and tidy up the farmyard. At any rate, typically it's a big deal for both sides. These are not the kind of snooty, urbane self-styled sophisticates with whom you probably hobnob but simple, common, salt-of-the-earth folks, hospitable to a fault. Maybe that's why you have such a hard time understanding. This thread was not about morning drinking but about ancestral kinship, family ties and Old World hospitality. As a language professor you should known that śniadanie in Polish is a broad and capacious term meaning everything from breakfast to brunch and lunch. If the meet-up had taken place at noon or 1 p.m., would you have also gone on your morning inebriation rant?

Law / Is there much demand in Poland for real ale? [38]

There isn't even a generally known term for ale in Polish. It is all piwo. Oxford Dictioanry gives 'ale' as the Polish equivalent of English ale. but no Pole would know what that means. It's a cultrual thing. Like asking: is there a market amngst the English for zsiadłe mleko, kwas or żur?

News / Who controls Gazeta Wyborcza?? [216]

Merged: Gazaeta Wyborcza anticlerical - Michalik

Poland's foremost Catholic authority, Episcopate Chairman Archbishop Józef Michalik has openly called Gazeta Wyborcza an anti-clerical newspaper.
fronda.pl/news/czytaj/tytul/abp_michalik:_widac_ideologiczna_nagonke__2073

Churchmen have long known the duplicity of the KOR-GW camp who used the Church when it suited them and stabbed it in the back when they felt strong enough to get away with it.

In the early 1990s GW was at the forefront of an anticlerical campaign alleging that Poland was threatened by a Catholic takeover comparable to a Khomeini-style system. That doesn't mean Michnik wrote editorials openly saying what he really thought about Catholicism (he probably felt he might need the church at some future point in time!?). Instead, he had others write the anti-clerical stuff for him, and when he penned something on the subject would hum and haw in feigned impartiality. But as chief editor he was responsible for everything that appeared in GW. There are far more subtle ways of Church-bashing and fomenting anti-Catholic attitudes. A few years ago the paper interviewed a post-communist SLD operative Paweł Borecki who was calling for a national debate on the Church's alleged attempt to take over the country. GW could innocently claim that those weren't necessarily their views, but in journalism a newspaper's political line is also reflected by whom it interviews, what it highlights, where it runs a given story, the size of the headlines it chooses, etc. Same when a few months ago a survey showed that only 40% of Poles regularly attended Sunday mass. Was it pure coincidence that GW triumphantly splashed it over its front page - the only paper to do so? Or what about the fact that GW's TV programme just happened (?) to have overlooked the offerings of TV Trwam. But as a regular reader of GW and language professor to boot, you are more than capable of reading between the lines or at least having a native speaker of Polish do so for you. So please don't play dumb. You know exactly what the GW party line is like and which ethnic roots are overrepresented in the GW's management and editorial structures.

Genealogy / What does Germanised mean? [29]

Parisville, Michigan was probably the 2nd settlement of Prussian partition Poles. Their language also reflected German influence in such expressions as 'Mój wnuk je trzy lata stary' (drei Jahre alt).

Life / Do Poles drink before noon? [95]

But if you were reunited for the first time in 50 years (never knowing if you ever would -- venturing behind the iron cut'rtain was a spooky expeirence to many Polonians before communism collapsed) or were in Poland for the first and probaly last time -- that's a whole different ballgame than visitng every year. I tried to covney in words (and words are always poor substitutes for the real thing!) the overall ambience of what many Polonians experienced.

Genealogy / What does Germanised mean? [29]

I think living in rural areas may help conserve the Old World language better than urban milieux can. My late dad once went hunting up in northern Michigan and in Alpena (pronounced: al-PEE-na) ran across an oldtimer whom he could speak Polish with. It was fluent, if somewhat raspy, dialectal Polish. My dad asked him when he had come over to Ameirca and the chap replied: 'Panie, jo jest urodzony w Alpinie' (probably a reflex of the Germanised Polish of Prussia: ich bin geoboren, rather than urodziłem się).

Life / Poland and every aspect..... Please help me learn and understand the realities? [108]

It's also conveninet to the age-conscious female half of the population. No-one coming to the party will ask: Whcih nameday is this, as someone might with a birthday. And no-one will comment on how few candles there are on the cake, because there is no such thing as a special nameday cake.

Genealogy / What does Germanised mean? [29]

Your ancestors were probably amongst the first Polish colonists to Ameirca, brought over from Śląsk by a priest named (believe it or not) Leopold Moczygemba. He set up the village of Panna Maria, Texas, said to be America's oldest permanent Polish settlement.