UK, Ireland / Hundreds turn out for funeral of Polish man who died alone on in County Clare Christmas Day [28]

A sad story and a beautiful story at the same time. A local choir performed at the funeral, a Garda escort accompanied his remains to the burial site and two musicians followed the coffin up to Drumcliffe graveyard. This is the Irish at their best and what makes Ireland such a special and truly unique place. "Ar dheis Dé do raibh a anam" (may his soul be at the right hand of God).

Food / Where to go for the best steak in Warsaw? [77]


Agree. Personally I much prefer the tough cuts of beef braised or cooked over minimal heat for a few hours, rather than a steak. Beef cooked in it's own juices with no added stock is delicious or you can simmer it in a bottle of cheap red wine for a really delicious rich sauce. Oxtail soup is another favourite dish of mine. Any beef dish cooked on the bone will be full of flavour. The one thing I miss beef wise in Poland is a traditional roast, as the animal seems to be butchered differently and you can't get a proper roasting joint.

Law / British national studying in Poland - need a Russian visa, what to do? [4]


Why would you be embarrassed?? Have you checked with the British embassy. They could probably advise you as I'm sure you're not the first Brit who's had to get a visa for another country whilst living in Poland. Or what about your college? Can the office there not assist?

Off-Topic / Polish and Russian Christians! Lest's unite today! [41]

The Russians are Orthodox. They celebrate Christmas in January but a very nice thought Ktos. Have a Happy Christmas yourself. God Bless you.

Law / Family law in Poland - want the Polish children back to the Irish courts [53]


You mean in theory, in reality it's rather different.


He could but it's quite likely he won't. You know quite well that if the mother doesn't want the father to see the child, she will ignore the court ruling and there's very little the father can do to enforce it.

@Number 47 I'm sorry to say that it's common for Polish mothers to use various excuses to get round such rulings. You've arranged a Skype call and:

a) nobody picks up
b) mother picks up, child is not home, he's gone to a birthday party, friend's house, on a school trip etc etc
c) child doesn't want to talk to you
d) child is sick

You've arranged a visit:

a)Nobody home when you arrive to collect child/nobody turns up at arranged meeting place
b)Someone opens door with the chain on, peeps out, child is not home/doesn't want to see you
c)visit is cancelled at the last minute, child is sick, mother will even produce doctor's note to prove it, doctors have been known to issue notes to perfectly healthy children


Yes, and she may try to keep it that way so that you can't pay anything, then go to court and ask to have your parental rights removed on the basis that you don't maintain the children and you don't see them.

Sadly I wouldn't put much faith in the Polish courts but if you want to choose that option, I would pursue it to the utmost. The PolAttorney is right when he says that perseverance is necessary.

The only thing I can advise is to do your best to try to maintain some contact with the children in the meantime. You may find that she will relent to some degree, probably after Christmas and may allow you some phone contact at least. I know they're very young but they've had the most important years of their development with you, between birth and six. They've bonded with you, they are emotionally attached to you and that counts for a great deal. She won't find it easy to undermine that, truly she won't.

News / Reactions of Poles to Negative Publicity from the Foreign Press [56]


And the same thing happened with Harry and Polonius yesterday by Harry's own admission. That's at least two Christmas miracles so far!

Language / Translation help..Christmas card in Polish [9]

Thanks Polly. That's lovely. Let's keep the Christmas spirit going though I have a feeling some people would probably like to organise a Christmas lynching and have us strung up among the fairy lights!

Language / How hard is it to learn Polish? [178]


As a native English speaker and learner of Polish, I would agree with that. Basic English in my view is more straightforward than basic Polish. The problem with Polish for me anyway, is the constant changing of the noun cases so that even the simplest sentence requires grammatical acrobatics. In English you learn a noun and that's it, you can use it any time, any place, anywhere. In Polish you have the basic noun form, you use it - it's wrong! Even the way in which people's names follow this rule, for God's sake, it's a minefield!

And then there's the 'endings'. My husband is constantly on my case about this. 'Your endings must be clear'. His advice is to choose an ending and say it clearly, even if it's wrong it will sound better than a weird, mumbled nothing! He says indistinct endings sound dreadful to a Polish ear.

However I have heard some appalling pronuncation from Poles speaking English that render the words almost unintelligible to a native English speaker.

News / TV Trwam to stop cooperating with Duda [17]


Absolutely. They're supposedly Catholic and therefore accept and defer to the Pope as their spiritual leader, so how do they equate their views with the warmth and respect shown by Pope Francis towards the Jewish community. It's another version of what Polly calls cafeteria Catholicsm. I prefer the term a la carte darling). They're in exactly the same boat as those of us who don't go to confession etc.

News / Monthly Smolensk Commemorations in Poland! [34]


And midday too Delph. How well I remember in school, the intercom crackled into life and we were all on our feet in an instant with deafening scraping of chairs and tables. It also involved genuflecting, thirty five of us in limited space. Ah happy days.......

I must say monthly commemorations sounds a bit over the top. Are they actually proposing that? Surely some low key annual event such as a commemorative mass (attendance optional) in each major town's cathedral would be sufficient.

Sorry I've just realised they already do some monthly thing. Are they suggesting some extras?

Food / Polish plum & prune cookery (for holiday entertaining) [3]

Polonius thank you very much for the recipes but when will you Americans learn to use the metric system - or even a weighing scales. I don't mind recipes with Imperial measures but the cups business is a bit much. Also American measuring cups are different in quantity to measuring cups available in the British Isles though we don't generally use them as we have mastered the scales. However I'll go online and look for a converter and hope for the best. Thanks once again and please can we have more festive contributions. Let's start getting into the Christmas spirit!

Life / What should a foreigner do when invited to join Christmas dinner with his Polish-friend's family? [21]

Young love - how nice! Firstly don't worry about the twelve meals. It's actually twelve dishes making up one meal, eaten on the evening of 24 December. Many of the dishes are prepared well in advance.They are all fish or veggie based. He won't expect you to cook all that and if he does - well, your New Year's Resolution should be to find a new boyfriend! A lot of Polish guys are quite good in the kitchen and enjoy cooking. Just offer to lend a hand with preparations. Here's a good site that gives a description of the food, plus photos:

culture.pl/en/article/the-12-dishes-of-polish-christmas and from the same site:
culture.pl/en/article/polish-christmas-eve-traditions
Wesołych Świąt!

Study / Transfer ECTS credits to a Polish university...possible? [13]

Well even though they're all EU countries, universities differ in how they approach it. My husband also studied computer science, started his studies in Poland, then moved to Ireland. The Irish university allowed him some credits against his Polish studies but not the full number of credits because the Polish university couldn't supply detailed enough syllabus information on all the course work to satisfy the Irish university that the courses were equivalent in terms of the material covered. He didn't have to repeat any elements of his previous study but he had to do a couple of extra courses of his own choice to make up the points. I don't know if a Polish university will be as fussy about the course content. They may simply accept it as equivalent without delving into it too much. You'll have to contact the universities you're interested in and ask them.

UK, Ireland / Estimated number of Poles in Ireland thought to exceed 200,000 OR over 5% of population. [200]


Through census returns. In Ireland they take a census every four years. It could be done through electoral rolls as well as all EU citizens can vote in local elections and your nationality is recorded but it's less reliable than the census as not everyone bothers to go on the electoral roll whilst most people complete the census forms. According to the 2011 Census, Polish nationals increased by 93.7 per cent since 2006 from 63,276 to 122,585 in 2011 making them the largest group ahead of UK nationals with 112,259.


That's a very interesting question. You can declare two nationalities and I imagine that most people would like to be recorded as both Polish and Irish. Also your place of birth is recorded on the census return so with those two pieces of information it's possible for the Central Statistics Office to get a clear picture of the number of non-native Irish citizens there are. Also the Irish Immigration Service keeps records of all citizenships granted so it's an easy matter to determine how many Irish citizens were born in Poland. There's so few that it would hardly make much impact on the overall stats.

Work / Some questions about average wages and hiring a cleaning woman/maid in Poland [23]


Everybody has an accent of some kind and the less of an accent, the more they'll expect to be paid. Less obvious accent often means higher social class and better education so they'll expect to be paid accordingly. Native English speakers, regardless of accent will generally not be prepared to work for the same money as locals or other groups of immigrants.


I'm sure someone would be willing to do that but what kind of meals do you want? Remember that she may not be accustomed to cooking the kind of dishes you eat. If you give her a cookery book will her English be good enough to read it? She may have basic communicative English but there are native speakers who can't follow recipes, believe it or not!


Whatever she's cooking, don't let her have access to a salt cellar.!
Poles generally add salt when they're cooking and lots of it.

As for what you should pay people, do the decent thing and pay what you can comfortably afford within your budget. If that's more than local rates then pay it.

Life / Is it common for Polish people to speak English in Poland? [122]


He was right.


Roger I feel your pain.


Maybe not, but RubasznyRumcajs thinks it's acceptable, in as much as he can't see any reason to correct it.


I believe Roger is referring to that abomination 'should of'.

Off-Topic / Protestant countries developed faster than Catholic countries [14]


What?? People had their hedges stolen? Outrageous!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privet

News / Poland's Department of Defense reports 24th anniversary of Radio Maryja [29]

Jesus never preached anything about hell. Quite the opposite. 'This is my blood, it will be shed for you and for all men so that sins may be forgiven.'

Life / Is it common for Polish people to speak English in Poland? [122]


Of course Celia is really speaking RADA trained Standard English or received pronunciation. However if you look at footage of Londoners taken during WWII for example or even in the 1950s or 1960s, you'll see huge differences between their speech and the modern vernacular That's also the case with Standard English. There was a study done I think about ten or fifteen yeas ago where the accents of students at Eton, that bastion of English public schools, were compared with the Eton accents of twenty or thirty years previously and considerable differences were observed.

Please back to the topic

Genealogy / Schalwig, Grittner, Schulz, Schmit, Szot, Bernat, Szwarc - were my ancestors Germans in Silesia, or Silesians? [22]



How interesting. In an English book I read, published in the 1930s one of the characters was a Prussian girl called Thekla Von Stift.I remember it was said of her that 'she had imbibed much of the spirit of Young Germany' meaning I think the Hitler Youth movement.

Real Estate / Price of residential property in Warsaw. What percentage of Polish people are house owners here vs renters? [7]


There are other members much more knowledgeable than I am about this but I'd say you wouldn't get a 'large' return in the mid-term, not in Poland anyway. Don't know about other central European countries. The best reason to buy a house is because you want to live in it. If you buy it as an investment at those prices, then you need to be prepared for the ups and downs of the property market and maybe be looking at passing it on to your kids or whatever but not expecting to get a big return from it in your own lifetime. That's just my view. I'm sure others will think differently.

News / PiS to force every hard working, low earning Polish family to pay for TV [96]


Yes but look at salaries and welfare benefits in the UK compared to Poland, so naturally the fee is a lot higher there.


It's heartbreaking really isn't it, the poverty so many older people live in. The idea that they should have to pay for a TV licence is outrageous. They should be exempt from the charge.


I believe there's been talk in the UK and Ireland about bringing in a licence to cover any device on which TV programmes can be viewed.

News / Kaczyński slams "political correctness" plague in Poland [85]


What are you on about you daft wazzock? Did you follow the link?? It's a tweet by an Irish farmer who has a boar called Polonius. I think Smurf posted it here by mistake, I thought I was in off-topic when I answered it.

News / Kaczyński slams "political correctness" plague in Poland [85]


Oh Smurf! You're a gas man - thanks for that!

Life / Water and Heating Charges in Poland [14]

This might be useful to people, bearing in mind that what counts is the number of litres you use so even though it's British, the information still applies.

ccwater.org.uk/savewaterandmoney/averagewateruse

It gives you the low, average and high figures for households of between 1 and 6 people.
Also here's a water use calculator where you can put in your exact specs based on your own family's usage:
bristolwater.co.uk/your-home/water-meters/water-use-calculator

Then I think if you just multiply your number of litres/cubic sq metres by the Polish water charges you should be able to roughly estimate and plan for your water bills.

News / Warsaw's silent march in support of 5th Commandment - Thou shalt not kill [75]


Sarcasm. And richly ironic as the same might apply to yourself. The difference is that I don't climb up on a soap box simply for the sake of it and start lecturing all and sundry about my views and philosophy on life. It is you who does that Polonius. You introduce these topics because you have a need to do so and you have a particular need to do it, not among like-minded people but among those whom you know have no wish to hear it. And that's precisely why you do it - in order to provoke. As a teacher, who has spent many years with emotionally damaged, needy children, I recognise it for what it is, the attention seeking behaviour of a disturbed, unhappy child. You need to engage with others but are not able to do so in a healthy, normal manner. So I do actually have sympathy for you which is why I bother to speak to you as I do.


Assuming the worst of your fellow man. Why should you do that?


They have been my concern for many years and I have done my best to serve them in simple and practical ways. I am sure there are other members of this forum who have also done what they can in their own way. I'm afraid that lecturing a random group of people about the perceived evils of the modern world does nothing whatsoever to help those children.

I should point out that of the children from what you call dysfunctional families, whom I have taught over the years, about half were from married parents. Some of the most violent and disturbed families were the conventionally, outwardly respectable ones. In schools where generations of the same family had attended, there was often a history of domestic violence going back decades well into the years when Ireland was a very traditional and conservative society.

But it's not my business to educate you about that. I'm just suggesting that you reflect on your behaviours now, in this life, while you have a chance to change them because what you sow in this life, you will surely reap in the next. Do what you can to reach some level of understanding and self-awareness now Polly because if you don't do it in this life, God will require it of you in the next and it will be harder and more painful there when the scales fall from your eyes and God lets you see yourself as you truly are. Good luck friend.

News / Warsaw's silent march in support of 5th Commandment - Thou shalt not kill [75]

Yes as a Christian I must try to be kind to everyone. Why do you think I bother to take any notice of you. I'm the only other Catholic member of the forum (apart from Ziemowit I think?) and when I hear the things that you say, in the name of religion I see how very far you've strayed from the path of Christianity. I've said it before and I'll say it again, and again, and again. It's not God who inspires your thoughts and words. God does not inspire spite, malevolence and contempt of others.

Do you not see that Jon, whatever his faith or lack of it, is far more of a Christian than you are? Because Jon is moved to unconditional sympathy and sorrow for the deaths of those people. Jon whatever his life choices has a purity of heart that you lack. I refer now in particular to your words to Jon regarding financial compensation for the bereaved family, Polonius, think about the words of St Paul from Corinthians: 'If I give all I possess to the poor ....but do not have love, I gain nothing.' And that is your own situation.

News / Warsaw's silent march in support of 5th Commandment - Thou shalt not kill [75]


And a prayer:

Keep me, O God, from pettiness; let me be large in thought, in word, in deed. Let me be done with fault-finding and self-seeking. May I put away all pretense and meet everyone face to face without self-pity and without prejudice. May I never be hasty in judgment and always generous. Let me take time for all things. Make me grow calm, serene and gentle. Teach me to put into action my better impulses, straightforward and unafraid. Grant that I may realize it is the little things of life that create differences and that in the big things of life we are one. And, O Lord God, let me not forget to be kind!

Food / Vegetables in Warsaw cheaper than Carrefour [10]

Do you not have a local Bazar or Targowisko? The prices in them can vary but they're often cheaper and fresher than the supermarkets.

News / Warsaw's silent march in support of 5th Commandment - Thou shalt not kill [75]


But there are tons of dysfunctional families with married parents. Married parents does not necessarily equal a happy home. Anyway to be honest I'm fed up of this discussion. It's very unsavoury because what you're doing is using the deaths of those little children (how could you Polonius really??) and their unfortunate mother as an excuse to attack unmarried couples. You'd be better off going down to the church to light a candle for each of those lost lives and say a prayer for those left behind to cope in the aftermath. I don't want to be involved in this exchange any longer. It's just not right.