Travel /
Poland - never again [593]
Another reason why I will not visit Poland is that Poland, just as the US and the rest of the world, became a smartphone zombieland.
Warsaw is barely passable as a tourist attraction, but for the Old Town. I can take churches, banks, and hotels as places worth seeing only for so long. Palac Kultury, surrounded by glass and metal, is hideous. Alone, it was a landmark.
To me, the only reason to spend money and suffer the flight are the people I will see and meet at the destination - if only for a ten-minute talk I usually start with "so, how is life here".
It's my experience that people respond to this opening very well. In many situations I had to excuse myself to terminate the encounter. Listening is hard and rare, and people appreciate it.
The universal problem everywhere is that smartphones killed this form of interaction. Everybody is on it, oblivious to the rest of the world. Only the third world war would get them out of that smartphone stupor, and only if it's nuclear.
Without the smartphone, eye contact is more likely. The body language easily shows if the person is open to a chat. Yesterday, I was again at the Rivers Casino waiting for my wife while she was "gaming". In the waiting room there were five people: every single one was molesting a smartphone. This in itself was still not the worst of it. The problem was that they were together as a group and still bored to death.
Just in case I failed to be clear enough, a summary: I will not go through the effort to watch foreign phone addicts. I can do it for free here.
