Law / Poland residency permit / registration questions. [23]

Okay, this might not be entirely accurate as the rules seem to change daily, but..here goes.

1) Yup. The owners of the place must give permission for you to reside there, and depending on the local authority, they might demand that all the owners turn up IN PERSON (yes, I don't understand this at all).

2) Yup, again. The concept of registration is that the goverment has an address to contact you at - to serve official papers/etc. This can be any address you want - it doesn't have to be the place where you reside.

3) No idea about the penalty, but it might not be the smartest move to move house and not have access to the old address. There's probably no way of checking, and once the new registration process comes in (that's been promised by Tusk, and was supposed to be implemented at the start of the year!) - but generally speaking, you want to make sure that you can collect mail from that address.

4) Yup - no problem. Again, it doesn't really matter where you're registered. Many people are actually registered at a different address to the place where they live - for example, students will live elsewhere, yet might be registered at an address in their hometown 500km away. The refusal for landlords to let people get registered is one big reason why the system needs reformed - it's a ridiculous situation.

It should be noted that as EU, there is next to no way of checking if you're complying with the rules or not. Many ports of entry to Schengen don't bother scanning passports, nor are stamps given to EU passport holders - so while the law might be that you should be registered within x time - there's really no way of checking. Non-EU is different though, as they'll have visa issues.

However - and you probably know this already. Not being registered means that you can't pay taxes or in fact do anything official with the state. This, again isn't a big deal if you're EU because you can just claim to be visiting - but I wouldn't risk it if I was non-EU. The possibility of getting deported from the Schengen area isn't insignificant, and I've heard stories about Americans falling foul of the 90 day rule - and subsequently getting banned from the entire area.

UK, Ireland / UK Sky TV in Poland [39]

No reason why it won't work - just that you'll need a big enough dish to get all the channels. Depending on the part of Poland you're moving to, you might need as large as a 2m dish - but certainly, your existing Sky minidish won't be good enough for all the UK channels.

The other thing is that you have to maintain a UK billing address and billing account - so if you're doing that, then it's a doddle :)

News / What Poland can't do right [113]

Woo, let's tear most of £ódz down!

(I really, really hate that city...)

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

Freeq is bloody dreadful, don't go near it...the lime one was particularly upsetting as it was so crap :(

That Gingers beer is absolutely lethal though, to anyone from the UK, it just tastes like ginger beer from a can. It'd be far, far, far too easy to drink yourself to death on that stuff :/

Life / Reasons for moving to Poland [291]


Much to my benefit today, actually.

I was getting the bus to the school with two of my fellow teachers - but as one of my friends had got there way before me and the other one, she ended up with some dour businessman-type sitting next to her. Of course, we get there and start talking in English about all sorts of nonsense (which probably really did sound like nonsense to him). After about five minutes, he clearly had enough and got up and sat elsewhere, which was nice :)

Although my pet hate is when people on buses here will try and sit next to you on one of those slightly-too-big-for-one-person seats. I'm developing new ways of irritating them as we speak, grrrr!

Law / How will the Zloty be against the British Pound over the next 6-12 Months [45]

I think it's stabilised somewhat at the 4.5ish level now - even with the interest rate cuts throughout the world, the Złoty just isn't being trusted at all by investors at the minute. It's perhaps foolish as the banking sector seems to be holding up fine here - but it's hard to tell.

It's funny, when I came here, it going below 4 seemed like a matter of time, but now...who knows?

Language / The Plural of Zloty? [46]

I asked a bunch of fluent English speaking Poles their opinion on this, and...

Two said 'zloties' - however, one says zloty in ordinary speech
One said 'zloties, but now I say it, it sounds wrong' - and agreed that zloty sounds much better
One definitively said 'Zloty, there's no plural in English'

So there's no hard and fast rule - I use one zloty, many zloty personally...but.

Law / How will the Zloty be against the British Pound over the next 6-12 Months [45]

It's anyone's guess. One bank failure in Poland and the Złoty will suffer - as despite the now huge difference in interest rates between Poland and the UK, people still aren't putting money into PLN. I noticed some banks are now offering deals which pay 11% here - so they're clearly getting desperate for cash.

I think the likelihood is that it'll remain somewhere between 4-5PLN-1 pound, but exactly where is a good question. It's also possible that the PLN may weaken against the Pound if the flow of money being exchanged starts to dry up - but I don't think it'll ever go above 5 to the Pound again.

I certainly wouldn't place any bets on the Pound-Zloty relationship in the coming year.