Poles as tourists in foreign countries

Because you were so active here recently, let`s reward it with another tourist story - to Russia, more exactly to Konigsberg. The guy is married to a Russian woman.

My first trip to Russia in 2024 and the first time I had a problem on the Russian border. The old visa expired in the fall, so a new one appeared in the passport. The officer looked at my passport for long minutes, I thought maybe she liked my photo that much. Unfortunately, at one point she reached for the phone - on the Polish-Russian border it always means trouble, no matter whether the phone is Polish or Russian. She glared at me.

- There's a mistake in the visa, they changed your name and surname.

- And what now ?

- I don't know, the chief will decide, move aside so that others can pass - what was to be done, I stood aside modestly and analyzed the situation. For me it wasn't a terrible mistake, but who knows how they will approach it. I began to regret that Galina was not with me, she is reliable in such situations, but I did not lose hope, after all, I learned a lot from her. The gray-haired boss came, listened to the officer and took my passport in his hand.

- The visa is formally invalid, you can't enter - it's as if I had been hit in the head with a blow. Tomorrow Galina is flying to Konigsberg from Sakhalin, we haven't seen each other for a long time, and here's a gong. I knew that no amount of arguments, complaints or shouting would help, I had to act like a Russian . I learned it from her, to talk in "human approach"

- Chief - I started humbly - my wife is arriving tomorrow, we haven't seen each other for a month and a half, I'm already shedding tears of longing. She's like a Japanese typhoon, she'll say it's my fault for not checking properly at the consulate, she'll talk to me about it for half a year. It's coming all the way from Sakhalin.

- You say wife? And where does he live? - the border guard became alert.

"Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, 7 Bumażna Street, 18 Quartira," I recited without hesitation.

- Well... come on, I'll let you go, but fix your visa when you come back, because you won't pass again .

The Russian official is not nice and smiling, he is often the master and master of our fate, it has always been like that here, but on the other hand he can break the rules when he deems it necessary. It's worth learning to speak "human approach" here.

Is it not the same everywhere?

In my 20s, living in America and driving around a lot, I would get stopped by police quite often because I was an idiot. However, I probably only paid 2 tickets in my whole life. I used the skills developed with Russian traffic police, to similarly avoid problems with American cops.

Here are my tips:

1) It really goes a long way, to spend a little bit of time memorizing military (state troopers) and police ranks. When you address someone as "trooper", "sergeant", "lieutenant", rather than just "officer" or even worse... "hey" - the treatment is immediately different.

2) Don't interrupt them, even if what they are laying out is orthogonal to the truth.

3) Apologize for causing extra work (because that's what they really hate)

4) Be absolutely honest about why you f*cked up (because more than anything they hate lies, since everybody is lying to them 24/7)

Nobody likes law enforcement, nobody likes the taxman, nobody likes bureacrats - and they are all perfectly aware of this. They pay "the people" back with the same kindness. So if you treat them at least a little bit like a figure of authority with a minimum modicum of respect, then the results are usually magical. If you talk to them, as if you are talking to an animated pig - then the results are predictable.

So yes, talk to humans as "humans", and not as pigs.

You forgot #5: Plea insanity.

Me: Officer, you forgot to ask why I was speeding.
Officer: OK, why were you speeding...
Me: Because I am a moron...
Officer: OK. Slow down...

I do. And most I know have an ok attitude.

I hate cops.

Only a loser becomes a cop.

You have to have a strange family to be a cop.

You have to have a strange moral/ethical coordinate system to be a cop.

Instead - be a fireman. Be an ambulance driver. Anything... just don't be a cop - because then you are not my brother anymore.

Or somebody who want to stop the bad guys!


??? Putting away criminals is immoral/ unethical?

You're a football fan! :) Spartak or CSKA?

You drifted away from the topic. The story about the Polish man married to a Russian woman didn`t involve cops but border guards.


The man looked around the city and noticed:
The aesthetics of old German cities with solid architecture and a lack of finesse, but with its own charm. Here it appears in a rudimentary state, but the Russians try to refer to it. Standard khrushchev houses, standing on one of the main avenues, have facades that look strikingly like old tenement houses, a result of the World Cup matches that were played here.

On the banks of the Pregoła River there are new apartment buildings in a similar style to ours in Gdańsk on the Motława River. They refer to the centuries-old tradition of Hanseatic merchant towns.

Everything else doesn't look very nice. Typical housing estates from various eras of the Soviet Union with characteristic built-in balconies, summer warehouses and drying rooms for laundry and fish, this has always been the case here. There are pipes running along the blocks, through which heat is supplied to the radiators, a Soviet invention. They could be buried in the ground, but in the event of a failure you would have to dig again, and this is easier. This makes sense in Siberian cities, where the ground turns into hard rock in winter, but here they probably did it out of haste. The city is marshy, apart from the Pregoła river, many smaller and larger streams and rivers flow through it, it may still be winter, but the weather is typical of early spring. Undeveloped and lower-lying areas turn into floodplains.

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Кони жрут мясо.

**** Spartak. Buncha homosexuals.


The topic was relationship of "small man" and power.

You tried to draw some caricature of Russia straight from Dostoyevsky and Chekhov.

I'm telling you it is the same everywhere.

Hello?

Центральный клуб Армии it is then. Why am I not surprised? :)

When walking down the street you see a woman being raped...Who do you call, if anybody?

Do you see that often?

In his mind's eye three times a day. 🤔

Nobody? I try to make brain pudding from rapist's cranium?

I know you love cops, just understand the love is not widely shared.

So many among them, are strange people with a hero complex. But as mentioned, firemen and ambulance workers for some reason do not act as if they are gods walking among mortal men - even though their profession is much more noble.

Recently, a cop told me - "If a cop tells you to do something, you do it!". I complied of course (don't wanna get deported on account of this troll), but was a little bewildered at how this guy manage to graduate the academy.

I don't like interacting with people with low IQ, high testosterone, and a child's conception of self.

Why does anyone go to Russia of their own free will?

Charming and poetic country, amazing wild nature (including women), hospitable and kind-hearted people, beautiful language, relatively low prices - perfect holiday destination. :)

To evade justice or to defect.

The same could be written about North Korea or Somalia, but no one in their right mind takes a vacation there.

I can't relate.... they don't want freedom.... they want to drag others under the same repressive yolk they accept..... there might be some nice individuals but overall..... nope.

Just like firemen, EMTs, rescue teams, ...

I love cops. I often tell them I am glad they are here.

When they pull me over I thank them. In return, I almost never get tickets. I never saw the muzzle of a Glock, either.

The last time I got pulled over for not wearing belts, he said: We want you alive...It was nice to hear.

But, they do. The difference is that firemen are better rested and don't suffer from the hyper-vigilism cops do.

I'd say firemen choose to a$$holes, where cops have to be.

It depends what country they're in, in terms of level of training and policing culture.

In some places it's mostly a graduate profession with a good gender mix and first class training, in others it's thugs and killers.

The guy is married to a Russian.
.
January mornings never make you feel optimistic, I looked critically at yesterday's shopping, nothing seemed to be right, you need to eat a normal breakfast. In a Russian hotel it is an additional expense - unlike in our country - if you want to eat in the morning, you have to pay extra. The room was small, a few tables and one waiter. There was no buffet, so I paid for a set with sweet pancakes and started looking for a free place. Breakfast is a meal that I like to eat alone, especially when traveling, it's time to collect my thoughts, plan the next day, but to no avail. All the tables were occupied, we had to sit somewhere.

There were a lot of uniforms with stars on their epaulets, which means that the officers, probably younger in rank, ate hurriedly and were probably in a hurry for some briefings. I didn't want to eat with them. War is an abstraction, I only know it from movies and books, and here are young men sitting who may be taking part in it. One of them may have killed a man or miraculously escaped death himself, maybe he had to send his soldiers to certain death because he was ordered to do so, or maybe he had never smelled real gunpowder before. I didn't want to know. I know it's a kind of cowardice, a denial of reality, but I wasn't ready for a real war yet.

The choice fell on a table at which two older ladies were sitting, wearing white blouses, sweaters and long skirts, officials on business trips or teachers.

Teachers. They came for training, they both taught history in their schools, it was a real treat for me. This field of knowledge has always fascinated me, it reminds me of a huge number of colorful puzzles. The difference is that in classic puzzles you can arrange only one image, and historical puzzles allow you to arrange many images, it all depends on which one you take in your hand. The topic of the training was very interesting, US policy towards Ukraine. I felt it was better not to argue with them, it would be a waste of time, the role of a humble listener seemed the most appropriate.

- And what do they say there, because it's hard for us to make sense of it all? - It was like pressing the starter button, for half an hour images composed of Russian puzzles flew before my eyes like in a kaleidoscope.

"""America wants to rule the entire world, in 2014 it spent 5 billion dollars to create a Ukrainian Maidan and overthrow the legal president, Europe is no longer enough for them, they want to make Ukrainians their slaves, who will toil for pennies in agricultural latifundia. Ukraine in American hands is a tool to weaken Russia, they will fight us to the last Ukrainian soldier, and then they will buy everything to make money there, and after all they are our younger brothers, we cannot allow that. They have lost their way, it is true, they have been deceived by those horrible nationalists from Lviv, but they will not manage without us."""

- But war is war, lots of innocent people die.

- And people didn't die in Donbas? They were shooting for eight years. And in Odessa they didn't kill people when they wanted to join Russia? Do you know anything about that?

I didn't know and the coffee had gone cold. It was a bit too much for a simple hotel breakfast. I said goodbye politely as I left, I could feel the eyes of the young guys in uniforms on me, they must have heard our conversation. I gave up the field without firing a shot, 1-0 to them.

Poles and Polesses who travel to Italy regularly complain of littered streets and rubbish everywhere.

onet.pl/turystyka/dalekowswiatpl/mediolan-smieci-na-ulicach-pety-z-papierosow-w-swiatowej-stolicy-mody/gg153e3,30bc1058

I remember how a few or a dozen years ago my friends went to Italy and proudly talked about what a developed country it was - wonderful highways, infrastructure, manufacturing power.

To be honest, after visiting a city that has the audacity to call itself the world capital of fashion, I am disgusted and I can honestly say that every Polish city beats Milan in terms of cleanliness and quietness on its streets.

I don't base my opinion of Italy solely on my visit to Milan. I've previously visited Naples, Venice, Prato and Bari, and I've seen a lot of uninteresting things there. In my ranking, it's one of the dirtiest countries in Europe. Although it still has a lot to offer in terms of tourism - the Alps, the Dolomites, Lake Garda and Sardinia are simply beautiful, the large cities of one of the countries belonging to the G7 group, the seven richest and most industrialized countries in the world, should simply be ashamed of how they look.

When I was in Venice a while ago there were plenty of Poles (mostly women) there and they (apart from looking a bit serious and earnest) were fine. Much more cultured and civilised than the r*SSians and Chinese who were there.

What a surprise, jon!!! They were fine, instead of attacking, raping, robbing and leaving you naked in the canal of Venice. Death in Venice at Polish women`s hands, what a wonderful experience it would be. hahahaha buhahahaha

That's the r*SSians.


That's massage parlours in Birmingham.

Joking apart, they were relatively normal compared to the r*SSian tourists there. A bit solemn though.

That`s natural. Polish people are serious coz their history is marked with crosses.