Can foreigners really understand Poles?

true just like it is true that some people speak many languages without gestures, lol

You look at it as a competition? You must be joking.

Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about something completely irrelevant.

Let's go on-topic again.


And I wasn't even serious in my first reply, I thought it was obvious, I don't know why you feel offended. But if you feel that, I'm sorry.

Nonsense! Everyone knows Norwegian is simply 'broken' Swedish. They have two main dialects because one is more broken than the other... LOL

No I don't but thanks for your positive response anyway :-)

have a great day :-)

You then, regard your native culture (excuse me, coulture) as distinctly different from Polish one, and it is based on ......?


open? like shellfish westerners :P
Don't know what you mean!


there no communal traits at all, sometimes group of right people do something but generally I would said that too much government interference and commercial attitude killed it as well or even better that in Aberdeen.


No, I'm asking about your opinion and other foreigners living in Poland, do you think that Polish people are different( in what way?) because they are Polish?


It is actually great observation, ?I think that only great barrier to understand others European cultures is language!
Language is the key in more ways then one!

Foreigners can mostly understand the Krakow accent.

ahhh... just Polish accent...
foreigners don't know the difference between Krakow & ex. Warszawa accents...

Ironside, you've got a bit of the Sean Connery in you. Yesh, we Shcots are shellfish (rak), LOL. I think you meant selfish which some are and some aren't.

There is still insularity here and if you haven't lived outwith it, you sometimes can't see it.

Communal in that there are many social occasions to celebrate together and there is a feeling of 'Polishness' which binds people here. That often disappears abroad where Poles often cheat one another.

Can foreigners really understand Poles?

I am going to diverge slightly here, as I will include all ex-communist countries.

It is (almost?) impossible for someone from outside the ex-commie countries to fully understand what communism was. There are still residual elements of communism left now in ex-communist countries.

Just look at what foreigners complain about most on PF, a lot of it has to do with the lingering communist mentality, bureaucracy and if you interpret communism as an invading force or occupation you can see that people don't respect the law so much as there seems to be a feeling that it is not their law.

But as I mentioned this does not apply just to Poland, every ex-commie country I have been to in Europe shows these symptoms and in my opinion Poland shows them the least and are more will and able to shed the shackles of Soviet occupation.

Very good observation, Sean. Communism was very demoralizing. Most of the ppl think of economical damage to the state when thinking of communism but forgetting how damaging it was for the people living under this inhuman system. It destroyed peoples work ethic for two generations.

Do you honestly think that? In what way? Is it just a problem of execution being the reason that it's not happening? The will to do so being there, but for some reason, it's not being done?

Shaking off a mindset is hard when it is deeply ingrained, the modus operandi stays and the process of change sometimes doesn't get off the ground. Look at a country that tried to turn the page from communism to capitalism, Hungary. They actually came out worse under the new regime and many yearned for the old ways where things were more predictable, though not always wholly desirable (my wife's mum, for example). Better the devil you know, as they say.

One would have thought that moving on would have been easier, especially given the collective resentment of communism. Still, we have the benefit of hindsight and we can see that it was a rough ride in the early 90's. Poland tried too much, too quickly. Wałęsa and Balcerowicz were overambitious and the new system faultered.

The bottom line is, change takes time. Just look at the area of change management within modern organisations. Plenty of case studies there. In Japan, the shinjinrui (young generation) is finding it very difficult to get the rojinrui (older generation) to budge and come round to their way of operating.

One final point, Poland had more commies within their ranks than they'd like to let on.

I don't. lived here over 10 years and I don't.

What is it that you don't understand about them?

That's true for a portion of the population, but definately not all (or most based on the share of the votes that the old communist parties have been pulling). Granted there is a certain nostalgia for the "old times", but people's ability to get past that seem to depend quite a bit on the country in question. For instance, you have the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Estonia who seem to have managed to adopt to their new situation quite well. A full generation was left behind during the switch, but the young in those countries don't seem to accept the bureaucracy and general control oriented mindset as those in other countries.

Anyway, after thinking about it a bit, maybe the partition plays a role in reluctance to change?

I don't mean to answer for Dtalyor but I am of a similar opinion based on my experience, it should be noted that I have only driven through East Germany and I have never been to Czech.

But I compare Poland to ex-commie countries I have spent some time in:

- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in fairness they were part of the U.S.S.R and Poland to them during communism was thought of as freedom in comparison to what they were being subjected to.

- Slovakia, although they have some better options for setting up businesses for tax and dividends purposes, it is still way behind Poland, perhaps because of it's size but I have seen statues of the communist liberators with young girls offering flowers there that old people still go to and pray.

- I was surprised in Hungary, how difficult buying a poxy sandwich was, everything had to be weighed individually, everything weighed had to have it's own little sticker, every sticker had to be added up at the end..... banging my head against the wall.... and that was in Pest.

- And when Croatia was communist Yugoslavia, it was very poor and people were more concerned about independence from Yugoslavia than just communism.

True, I should have qualified what I said better. I meant those who work in offices, those old fogies that were set in their ways. The young generation took the transition in their stride for the most part. Estonia was perhaps the most adept at running a relatively paper-free bureaucracy. Most people were happy to see the back of communism, that is true.

Give a guy a little power and BOOM!!! straight to their heads.

I will never forget years ago the bastard Irishman in the Irish Embassy in London, a little little man.


Of course but it also has to be necessary, most people won't change anywhere in the world unless it is necessary and they want to change.


I think Poland because of Catholicism is and was not so nostalgic.


I agree with what you say to a certain extent about young people but the young are not in the offices, they don't run the country.

Some will resist the change and others won't, simple :)

Yeah, I don't know how it is in Ireland but some councillors in Scotland are on constant power trips. The same as here, I laugh at those who look down their noses at me. Chumps!

That's a good grouping there. You can see how different one is from the other even though they all went through more or the less the same under communism.

Yep, sorry for changing your post but you know, Friday night and all.


The Baltic states have a huge problem now.

Since I first travelled in the Baltics 11 years ago, Estonia was the most forward thinking, wanted to computerise everything, had ambition. I believe that Finland helped Estonia (mentally), whereas Latvia and Lithuania were isolated (or at least felt it).

Also Latvian and Lithuanian languages are not completely different from one another like Estonian is.

But just look at the populations, Latvia has very few people all living in Riga, Estonia has the same amount of people as some towns in Poland and Lithuania had the same population as Ireland (before the E.U. Immigration policy).

Sorry for continuously editing my posts, friday night and all :)

Those teenagers during the fall of communism will be running the country soon. Donald was only 32 when communism ended, quite a few members of the sejm (and mayors) were teens in 89.... and then you had

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafa%C5%82_Wiechecki


And I'm at home with a cold a case of beer, expect edits to come.

I meant in the Baltic states.
There is a few generation gaps between people under 30 and over 30.
I honestly don't know how they communicate, parent to child, on most levels it is that different.

And that is part of the big difference between Poland and other ex-commie states.
Tusk for a good example, he looks great to other E.U. members, non threatening, isn't going to go on too many commie hunts... a fresh face.

The Lithuanian's have got a female president newly elected but the president has about as much power as the president of Ireland, basically a diplomat and the ability to veto for a while.

They are constantly pushing against change, as many of the over 30s see no difference (which is very wrong) between the Soviet and European Unions.




Why does everyone think that it is so so easy to change, even for Poland which only came out of communism 20 years ago?

Seanny, that's ok. I disagree, having had first-hand experience with Japanese councillors. They are of a different ilk.

Anyway, no sidetracking. I don't think this thread has yielded enough by way of this 'understanding' which the OP wants to tease out. No hard cases as of yet. Poles really don't stump me whatsoever, their actions are often logical and with rhyme/reason just like other people.

But in fairness to you, you'd understand Poles better than most living here and being a socialite ( I presume you are good in a crowd because of your posts on here).

But lets face it, communism is even madder (in a way) to the media circus these days.
I like to find out about communist times, the same way I like to find out about the Japanese
In some ways it feels distant (iron curtain) and in other ways it's just pure madness which these days is in the shape of bureaucracy and general nonsensical paper work where the director with the stamp is king.

I lived and worked in Lithuania and the bureaucracy here in Poland is '''easy '' in comparison to what I had to put up with.
Someday I will go on a rant about the mafia, dead bodies being dumped on the land, guns held to my penis etc...
But all of that is for another time possibly another Seanbm :)

I knew we had something in common....

I thought I really good stories about the 'stans, but gun to the captain, that's just not right.

What I also tend to find is that foreigners have misconceptions about communism and how it impacted on people on the streets. They blindly label some, 'commies', without being able to understand just how communism manifested itself. Also, they also don't have a frame of reference by which to evaluate it.

Maybe if some resident PF members like Pawian came forward and did a short contrastive study of Now Vs Then, it may shed some insight into the behaviour of some.

Honestly and this during peace time in Vilnius, Lithuania only four years ago.


To say the least and all the knacker wanted was a poxy cigarette.

But the dead bodies were different.
I went for one month here to Krakow and when I got back someone had dumped about 15 dead bodies in mounds of soil on the plot I was developing.

There were bones all over the place, now I can't tell a human's bone from a cow's bone or a sheep's bone but when you see the human (possibly ape:) jaw bone, there is not much else to say.

I have photographs of the skeletons and do you know what was the response in Lithuania?, "It's normal, this is Lithuania".
The bones started going missing, as this was in the city and kids walked to school this way, people walked their dogs this way....
I couldn't believe that it was taken so lightly.....
Ah HA, you see I have to be careful not to go on a rant.... but to put a long story short, I thought it was the mafia "telling" the foreigner (me) to leave. I was wrong, it was someone who dug up a cemetery and dumped it on the plot I was developing.

One of the many strange things about it was that the archaeologist told me (he thought I was lying the whole time and that it was me who did it) that it was from outside of the city and brought in and dumped on the plot.

The police conducted an "investigation" in which they found no crime had been commited after 6 months and no notification.
I burst, I flew into the police office shouting and roaring about no crime had been commited and dead bodies were dumped! and if no crime had been committed I could take it all and dump it on someone else's plot???????? well they said they couldn't answer that......

GGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR...... my blood is up just thinking about it.

As I said a rant, perhaps we will have a beer someday and I will be all animated about it hahahaha

Anyway.

Edit*
Three live mines, one of those canon trailer vehicles that you mount a cannon on (without canon) loads of shells both huge and small were all later found actually burred on the plot.

Haha, I remember about 15 years ago in Germany my dad took me to a lake that had dried up over the summer. I started prodding at the big cracks in the ground and we found some bones. First thoughts were the same, maybe some animals ended up drowning, dig a bit more, a human skull staring at you will quickly set you straight. Anyway, called the police, they came out, bagged up some of the bones, and that was that. Later we got news that it was the dumping site for local graveyards... unbeknownst to the land owner... It freaked me out even more when it was explained to me that after a certain amount of time they just dig you up and that's normal...


That's entertainment that I wouldn't mind shelling a couple of beers out for.

*Edit
No landmines in the lake