Life / Top 5 things I like about Poland [77]


Someone once moaned to me that his father had been working in the UK and hated the bread. It turned out he'd only ever done his shopping at petrol stations and Iceland. Anyone eating only leathery bread from petrol stations in PL would say the same thing.


I've noticed that.

There are improvements, however much of what is sold is still Baltonowski.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]


There was a case of something like that; and of course the public vote can be skewed by large numbers of people in one country who are from another. A few years ago, the UK popular vote was for a particularly dire entry from Poland. This was post-2004. Also, plenty of votes in Spain for the UK and Germany.


Often isn't all. There have however been cases of coruption, some suspected, some confirmed, over the decades.


Or those of the public who a. watch Eurovision and b. make a point of voting.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]

@Paulina
And you don't have to try to put words into people's mouths.

Eurovision this year was fairly dire. It's good that the semi-finals boot out some of the worst ones, however they were always the most amusing.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]


Hard to know what dank crevice you pulled that one from.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]

That's often a sign of that.

Life / Top 5 things I like about Poland [77]


I don't see that. Just small factories making the same stuff and in better areas, chains masquerading as independents.


Same everywhere, especially that appalling Baltonowski. Nevertheless, all UK supermarkets of any decent size, as well as some in Poland, do sell better stuff.

Life / Is it worth returning to Poland in old age? [168]


No. There is no excuse for one.

Life / Top 5 things I like about Poland [77]


Perhaps that's the socio-economic and educational level of the types who would allow you in their house.


There really aren't. Those little places that sell it (and the cakes) get them all delivered from a factory.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


Screw foreign countries' "constitutions" and "biblical" is for the private lives of those who like that sort of thing.

Under real laws, self-defence is usually a defence to murder or manslaughter.

Hard to know how this relates to the reemergence of Nazism in Germany.

News / Grzegorz Braun extinguishes Hanukkah candles in Polish Parliament [459]


He really wouldn't.

The guy is deranged. He lets offf fire extinguishers at festive parties, defaces exhibitions he doesn't like and has fortunately now had his immunity from prosecution (what the hell do they need those for? the Soviet Union is dead now) and faces criminal trial.

Off-Topic / Pop A Cork - Wine [440]


Gin?

No, they tend to drink vodka, fruit flavoured 'wines' or nasty american 'whiskey'.


The last beerenauslese that I drank was crazily sweet.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]

The Austrian one was OK, if unsophisticated. The Polish one was as usual desperately bad, the Dutch one depressing and the Swedish one looked as if the singers were geography Teachers.


Bribery probably.

Off-Topic / Pop A Cork - Wine [440]

It's drinkable and cheap. I buy it.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]


Far from that, and mostly fun. Even the dreary folk dancing or almost deliberately boring ones.


The frog one is about a miserable subject, and as for the Irish one; they know what they're doing. Dead dogs are never a vote winner

Poland's is like watching paint dry.

There are one or two weird folksy ones too.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]

It's about miserable French songs, tacky Balkan costumes, crap Polish entrants, deliberately crap Irish ones since they're sick of winning, obvious bloc voting and about Sweden getting first place in the end.

Not about fúcking Israel and Gaza. That's been puked over plenty of other threads here.

News / Grzegorz Braun extinguishes Hanukkah candles in Polish Parliament [459]


All that is good has sent him to keep the fascist vote nicely split.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]

Who knows how the Spanish describe foreign food restaurants in their own languages. We should annex the nice bits anyway. If Putler gets away with invading Crimea, we could probably do from the bottom to a bit after Malaga. It would stop them being twatty about Gibraltar.

Nostradamus wrote a quatrain about it:

From Albion's coast the lion shall descend,
To seize the olives where Castilian donkeys bray
Mazurswife, lice-crotched, shall feign to defend,
Her loins ablaze with cockroaches all day.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]

@mafketis
English restaurants. The food doesn't suit the weather. It's not really Spain though, more Essex.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


As a noun, it's basically taproom talk, not for here

Even "ethnic neighbourhood" or "ethnic restaurant" is iffy since all neighbourhoods and all restaurants are ethnic (or multiethnic".

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]

In English?

Mentioning people as being from ethnic minority backgrounds or living in such a community is fine. The neologism "ethnics" as a noun to describe people was created as a slur and is only used as such.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]

There are so many different ethnicities; all of us have one, some have 100% one and 100% another, however saying or writing "ethnics" in English is to use a term which exists to offend.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]

Yes. The word is a neologism that's only used as a slur and as othering.

It's the constant othering by some voices in society that reinforce divisions that need not exist.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


A loaded word and best avoided, however it proves my point. Living within in a closely knit community, they still get the nurture.


Who said they did? And why would someone do that?


Do you mean "other people"?

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]

@mafketis
Remember people born and bred in, say, the U.K. or the U.S. and have a Polish granny aren't Poles and don't behave, act or think like Poles.

It's the same with any culture, Take a kid out of their environment and they'll be a very different adult to what they'd have been if they'd not left.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


Or taking responsibility for things. A fatalist society. That's how things have turned out though, nurture not nature, and we shouldn't beat in them too much for it.

News / Will PiS be happy if AfD wins elections in Germany? [1442]


There's the elephant in the room.

Gaza is slap bang next to the northern Egyptian conurbation, one of the largest and poorest in the world with a huge birth rate and little in the way of an economy.


Lots. It's not all cosmopolitan ex-Varsovians or people with one foot in Tel Aviv and another in Brooklyn or Glasgow. Millions of people there came from other parts of the MENA region after 1948 to escape pogroms. Most are generationally poor.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]


Australia and Israel are surrounded by stuff culturally further away and both countries buy a lot of TV from Europe, especially the Royaume-Unis

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]


Some of the acts are spectacular.

If you follow your own country who keep sending garbage despite other countries around Europe listening to their music the rest of the time and having laws to limit its airplay, it's sad to watch them plummet down the scoreboard.

Always Sweden and Ireland winning.

History / Is there any part of Polish history that's at least a bit glorious? [239]


Germany isn't "hell'.

Unless you mean pale beer.

Off-Topic / Eurovision - Today I will be ashamed to be Polish [583]


Same same.

Countries that have worldwide hit songs send their shít songs to Eurovision