History / POLAND: EASTERN or CENTRAL European country? [1080]


That is why I wrote "a bit" in my message. We still have a lot of time to change our mentality completely. It is not like we can be Western country from day to day, but comparing to, let's say 15 years ago, we have changed drastically. I would rather say that those who are over 60 years of age cannot adjust to modern times, but these who are over 40 surely can. We speak foreign languages (not only Russian as it was before), we spend more money on things like shopping, entertainment, technology, we go on holidays abroad etc. We are much closer to Western Europeans than you think.

Ok, I am 25, but I see a lot of changes in my parents behaviour, their purchasing power, their hobbies, leisure etc. They are both 52. All has changed rapidly over the past few years.

History / POLAND: EASTERN or CENTRAL European country? [1080]

Central. For a few reasons: EU biggest eastern borders are between Poland and Ukraine/Belarus, plus I think our mentality is a bit more Western than Eastern.

Life / Do you think that Polish people are rude? [951]

Sticking to original question: I think we are not... unless someone is rude to us. At least this is for me. When someone is nice to me, I am nice to him/her too. If someone is not, sorry, but I will either ignore this person or won't be nice.

Few days ago, some article appeared saying that 85% of Polish people live in stress - in Polish if anyone wants to have a look). This may be a reason why sometimes you feel that someone in the shop, on the phone etc. is rude to you (these poll said that 15% that don't feel stress are mostly people over 50 years of age, pensioners or unemployed people). I understand such people because I work with Polish clients as customer service person for 5 years now. Now I am happy from my job, but in the past I had a bad boss and plenty of clients who did not understand something and blamed for everything etc. Stressful life did not make it easy for me and sometimes I was rude too. Another thing is that customer service people are not paid well so they are annoyed that they are coping with a lot of stress, work a lot of hours a day (sometimes people in cash desks work for like 12 hours a day or more), and can't afford to live a normal life because of their salaries. I think if you met such people when they are, for example, on holidays, you would see they are much nicer than at work :)

As many as 85 per cent of Poles feel daily stress and anxiety. In this group, 60 percent . people are trying to unload it , but not always in a way that is beneficial to health - studies have shown TNS presented Tuesday in Warsaw.

The survey , "How Poles care about the heart" was conducted on 16-19 June at the request of Bayer on a representative sample of 1000 people aged at least 18 years of age. The results were presented at a press conference " Heart Academy ."