Life / Are foreigners welcome in Poland? [267]

Unfortunately there are stupid people in every country who look for an excuse to be violent. Sometimes they can be your fellow countrymen and you 'looked at them the wrong way' or 'dissed them' or you can be a foreigner in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I've lived in poland for over ten years and have never personally witnessed any unprovoked form of racism.
Niether have I ever encountered the staring syndrome (but I'm english and white so I don't really look very different).
Then again I live in a smallish town (about 50 000 residents). Probably it's worse in the bigger cities. Possibly because they have to put up with tourists getting very drunk and behaving very badly and assuming an absurd sense of superiority.

A year ago I was in Kraków and I was terribly ashamed to hear almost nothing but drunken brits making an exhibition of themselves in the market square.

Of course ten years ago it was a little different, there were less foreigners here and most people automatically wanted to 'be your friend' if only to practice there english. Nowadays we are not so much of a novelty.

As an aside, I find it difficult to believe polish people don't like foreigners when one of the most popular main stream TV programs is Europa da się lubić. Polish people in general, seem to be very interested in how foreigners experience life over here.

Love / Age difference, my Polish girl is 23 and I am 39 [42]

Maybe it's more common than we think. I was 39 and my wife was 23 when we first met. We've been together for 10 years now ( and I only earn a polish salary ).

When the Bans were posted at the British Embassy for our wedding I noticed a lot of the other Bans posted also had fairly big age differences.

Off-Topic / What's your connection with Poland? Penpals. [554]

Lived here for 11 years.
Polish driving licence.
Employed by Polish company.
Polish wife.
Polish Son.
Polish mother in law (living with us at the moment).
Waiting for Polish citizenship.
Can almost speak Polish.

Study / "MAGISTER" OR "MASTERS DEGREE" - ARE THEY THE SAME? [75]


Quite a lot of extra mural students do more than that amount of work. Consider those who are working in jobs already related to their studies. My wife was working for a western multi-national whilst studying for her magister part time. For her the studies were easy as she was living and breathing the subject everyday. She qualified with 5+ plus some kind of special medal.

The best engineers I've worked with are those who studied for the old HND qualifications whilst working or completed OU courses whilst working. I've also had to suffer the dross who pratted around at uni and new absolutely nothing of any value when they started work.

Don't get me wrong I'm not knocking pure academic research. Real acedemic studies are of great value but the majority of people studying are only there to get a certificate to get a job. At the risk of repeating myself any potential employer would be far more interested in somebody with relevant work experience and a degree than someone with a degree. If I was searching for someone to carry out acedemic research I would be looking for someone with the best possible degree from the best possible university (ie work experience).

Don't knock all part time students, agreed some of them are wasters but many full time students are wasters also. I've had the mispleasure of having worked alongside them far too often.

Study / "MAGISTER" OR "MASTERS DEGREE" - ARE THEY THE SAME? [75]


Who said 50 hours of study on top of their full time work?

If you are working in a related field then what's to study? You have to study or be trained at work to do the job. Agreed not in all cases but as I stated a lot of cases. When my wife was studying she was working with MRP systems that was one big chunk of her studies that she had better knowledge of than anyone who would have been studying full time and not exposed to the daily reality.

I've seen the syllabuses for many courses and what the capabilities of the students should be after studying. Don't talk about just hours, many full time students are playing at the game whilst those working are facing reality where things matter and the details are important. Most of the courses (I'm not talking about purely academic ones) are so broad based that they only give a flavour of the subject. Whether someone studies 4 years or 7 years in cloud cuckoo land, it's still cloud cuckoo land.

So we return to the theme that a degree only shows you are capable of studying. What you have studied may be of no real use. Passing your exams, completing coursework is your proof that you can study. If you can do it in 1 year or 5 years I don't see the difference. If your trying to convince me that someone who studies 2 years longer will be so much more of an expert on the subject that they will immediately be fully exploitable in the workplace then I'm sorry but I'm not conviced. If you are telling me that someone with a degree should after further training have the capability to do a job then I agree. But in this case if someone can learn the subject to pass the exam in shorter time, wouldn't that make them the harder working and brighter person.

UK, Ireland / Why are Polish people, especially women, so disrespectful toward the English? [437]


I totally agree. My wife always laughs when I praise the Polish health service, according to her they just treat me so well because I'm English.

On another occasion at work we had a problem with a complaint to a supplier. He was justifying himself and claiming that our companies engineers were in the wrong. When he heard that the engineer involved was English he completely changed his stance, apologised and corrected the mistake!! My wife was the person communicating with the supplier and again she was amazed at the total turnaround just because I'm English.

I must admit that the respect we used to get probably wasn't justified and was based off an archaic image of the english gentlemen. These days I notice that it's decreasing, probably due to an increased familiarity ( 'familiarity breeds contempt' ). Probably not helped by the drunken yobs visiting Kraków as well.