I just found this video by a Ślązak living in Ireland for 20 years about the benefits and drawbacks... he likes the people and the location but hates the weather, traffic culture, poor workmanship and the healthcare system...
I'm sure that lots of Poles would agree about the youtube channels that seem to bother him wherein Poles criticize the modern UK (or Ireland, I'm sure there are some criticizing Ireland too....)
joined the board 5 days ago and in this short period of time somehow managed to make over 100 posts
He's very much in line with Brits I've known in real life who are personally offended by anything in Poland that's different from the UK.... IME they are the Europeans that adapt least well to Poland and usually either leave as quickly as they can or bump along from disaster to disaster until they can't take the country not adapting to them anymore and leave.
Some do settle and acclimate and learn the language and how things function but that's a minority.
As I've said, I did my fair share of venting about things in my early days but at some level I did realize I was venting* and fortunately there was no internet for me to immortalize my rants about how I needed to take over Polish TV and give a series of educational lectures....
*complaining when living in a new country is a necessary process to deal with cognitive dissonance and other tensions... I don't trust anyone who doesn't vent in that kind of situation....
self determination for Palestinians would be beneficial for them
Aren't they going to use any self-determination they have to attack Israel? And then get their @sses handed back to them? And then isn't everything back to square one?
This is not a problem that can be solved by giving one side more power than it already has....
I would prefer impaired driver as a cover term for both. And drink driver creates a mental image of someone driving a martini glass.... drug driver sounds like a delivery man....
No. He decided to say something to let westerners calm down.
The first tweet is far closer to what he/the russian government really think....
So many westerners think that russian values aren't that different from those in Europe or the US.... so they see things like the invasion of Ukraine as a deviation from the norm and times of relative peace as russia trying to be itself.
In actuality russia hasn't changed for hundreds of years, it's designed to be an empire that perpetually expands by military force. Anyone who doesn't realize that is just fooling themselves.... when putin said russian borders don't end anywhere.... he meant it.
Trump trying to stop the war by offering russia better trade deals was just deeply embarrassing and stupid
suggest that Poland remains an arch-Catholic Conservative country
Not especially, even in PRL times Catholicism was largely about opposing the soviet imposed communist government and the church burned through a lot of good will very quickly by getting involved in politics....
Church attendance has not really recovered after the pandemic either.
And Catholicism in Poland has never really been about deeply held spiritual beliefs either - that's a real misunderstanding of Polish realities.
Although I'm not a believer I'm not anti-religion by any means but almost no Polish people are interested in talking about the big spiritual issues and meaning of life and related questions - which is very different form the US where lots of people like to think and talk about those things.
nice places have gone now and been replaced (if at all) by less interesting things.
Exactly what I mean when I say it's becoming more like other European capitals and less like other Polish cities....
On google maps I saw the former wonderfully seedy dworzec wileński in Praga is now a shopping mall.... (head.... desk).
The thing is that post WWII Warsaw was kind of a bland place (unavoidable given the history) without a ton of local character compared to places like Krakow or Wrocław or Łódź and now it's even more so.
Another song by them from the same album.... I remember my Polish teacher told me that it's not about Africa at all, but Poland and Polish people...
My quick translation of the lyrics:
Violence is everywhere, violence is in you Violence is in me, violence has always been there Violence will always be, violence violence was in you Violence was in me, you know the law and rules You can't do anything about it I have to manage it for myself Still for many days Still for many years Everything will have a bitter taste Treachery is everywhere
original: Przemoc jest wszędzie przemoc jest w tobie Przemoc jest we mnie przemoc zawsze była Przemoc zawsze będzie przemoc była w tobie Przemoc była we mnie znasz prawa i zasady Nic na to nie poradzisz I sam z tym radę musisz sobie dać Jeszcze przez wiele dni Jeszcze przez wiele lat Wszystko będzie miało gorzki smak Zdrada jest wszędzie
Warsaw? If I lived there, I'd probably hate Poland
I think it's actually pretty liveable. I used to spend more time there when I had a friend who often traveled and asked me to cat sit. Living there might be different (bigger bureaucracy and different inheritance from rozbiory....) but it's a nice place to spend some time if you don't have a schedule to follow....
My old favorite part was the Jarmark Europa, I was very sad when it was closed.
Customer service was not, however, any kind of concept that meant anything (even in comparison to other cities in Poland) so it had its frustrations too....
don't want to be giving Putin excuses for the 'denazification of Poland'
Tell me you know nothing of russia without telling me....
In modern russian uisage, 'nazi' simply means 'opposes russian revanchist expansion'.... so you're already a nazi to russians.
And russians don't hate nazis... they were bvtthurt that the nazis turned on them and they fantasize about what it could have been like had they stayed together.... see the "comrade Gitler" popadanets series...
The accordion is musical royalty recognized across the world and flourishing in some of the best dance music ever created from South Africa through Latin America.
Poles in the U.K. often suffer from this, in part because
Also, Poles in the UK are mostly (not all but probably over 51%) from those who were not doing well in Poland in part because of limited educational and social capital.
I remember hearing wild stories about Greenpoint Poles (by a person who'd spent time there) and they said these were country people (a lot from around Suwałki) who would have trouble adjusting to places like Warsaw or Wrocław....
Majority of Poles think the sun shines straight out of America's dupa
Not anymore.... attitudes are a lot more reasonable now. And.... I remember an article in Wyborcza about 20 years ago about a sub-genre of disco polo made in the US (after it fizzled out in Poland) where the main subject matter was how terrible life in the US was.... I can't remember any names
Living in another country always involves disruption and alienation.... but you'll get over it.
Dude... I'm an American (no Polish ancestry whatsoever) who's lived here.... a long time. I vented mightily for a few years about everything wrong in the country and then I eventually calmed down (still complain but not the clueless 'people are so rude!' culture shock stuff that newcomers are famous for)
And bureaucracy is sooo much easier now. I had to renew my residence card last year and the whole process was very easy, requiring just three trips to the urząd (to leave off the online forms I filled out and the other necessary documents; then for a quick in-person interview and then to pick up the new card). Easy Peasy!
Empik did,
Pre-Empik (hard to imagine, I know...). I remember finding anything in English I would want to read was a big challenge then... but I didn't expect random Ruch kiosks to carry the Atlantic or Vanity Fair....
This guy had actually been homeless in the UK. Apparently he had been doing fine in an office career and then economic disruptions meant he lost his job and ended up on the streets for a time. Apparently there was a program then that trained some homeless people as English teachers and then sent them out of the country. He was very upfront and not embarrassed about it (good for him!) But knowing that I could think of at least three other Brits from around that time that I suspect had been in similar straits as their presence in Poland was otherwise hard to explain and they all had tells about having been up against it as some say.
hen Poles emigrate en masse to a country (e.g. the UK), and then complain about other migrants
Poles are very far from the only nationality to do this. It's completely normal for those new to a country to be out of sorts and frustrated and to vent for a while. Eventually it cools down.
amazing poetic justice would be if, with Poland's much-lauded economic rise, IT were suddenly subject to vast amounts of economic migration from a poorer and culturally different country
Ukraine before the pandemic doesn't count? The process wasn't problem free but what was astounding was how few problems there were....
how absolutely maniacally nationalistic, against integration, and arrogant about "our country's stuff" do you have to be
Back in the 90s I remember an British guy (I think English but partly Welsh if that makes sense) who was very upset that Ruch didn't care British press or British cigarette brands.... same guy actually bragged that after 10 years in the country he spoke no Polish (apparently his wife did everything for him and I suspected she had channeled her maternal instincts into sheltering him from reality).
I find any religion/culture telling people female hair offend God to be retarded
I tend to agree. On the one hand I don't care if women in those cultures want to uglify themselves of their own free will but the evidence is that it's not just their own free will...
And I object to muslims wanting to change laws and customs in the west to try to normalize their weird pathology...
The law in Iran doesn't force anyone to wear full hijab.
Then why are their legal penalties for not wearing hijab?
And the marks ate it up and asked for more..... (knowing how professional wrestling works is an amazingly good key for figuring out how politicians do things).
our elites were slaughtered in partitions, wars and uprisings
Evolution can deal with that.... which is why many impressive people come from unimpressive parents and why high achieving parents often have average (or below) children.
What Poland (many countries actually) need is better ways of spotting and nurturing talent as well as finding graceful exits for the failspawn of elites.
The US came close to that during a few long stages in the 20th century but that's over....
