Wine, women, and song

I’d like to say a few words about the buying of wine in Poland. A surprising number of people have told me that Poland is in a ‘transitional state’ when it comes to alcohol consumption. It’s passing slowly and painfully from a ‘vodka’ culture to a ‘beer and wine’ culture thereby bringing it in line [...]

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Crazy Ivan

In the depths of the mid-January blues I have, nevertheless, managed to come up with a pointless and probably insulting generalization about the Polish people. I’ve decided to wholeheartedly embrace generalization both because it’s funnier than balanced reporting and because it fits in nicely with my inherent laziness.
In the 1990 movie The Hunt for Red [...]

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7-things-about-me meme

I’ve squirmed and vacillated about this one ever since Flowers on a Friday tagged me last week. I’ve never been the victim of a meme tagging before and, at first, I was apprehensive about the idea. I felt a little afraid and thought about calling the police in a plaintive tone of voice. There’s something [...]

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Fear of the Beatroot

This is kind of an ‘Elephant in the room’ issue. Anybody who blogs in English about Poland is aware of the Beatroot. He’s the Cory Doctorow of expat Polish blogging (astonished to note that ‘Cory Doctorow’ is accepted as a properly-spelled term by WordPress spelling software while ‘WordPress’ isn’t!)
Exactly what is his(?) secret. The guy [...]

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An upper lip of remarkable stiffness

At the Battle of Waterloo Lord Fordyce of Crote had the misfortune to be struck by a cannon ball that severed his left leg below the knee. He turned to the Duke of Wellington and said “Gad Sir! My leg’s off. That’s going to make it damn tricky to play cricket.” Trapped beneath the peak [...]

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Save the Darth!

Some of you may or may not have received a slightly cryptic email from Darthsida last night. The fact that it was cryptic may not have surprised you (what else would we expect from Darthie), the fact that it essentially announced his imminent retirement certainly should have. The truth is that Darthsida is on the [...]

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Learn Polish on YouTube

I’m not big on resolutions. In fact the last resolution I made was a millennial resolution not to make any more New Year’s resolutions. I’m quite proud of the fact that I stuck to that one for seven years but, all good things must come to an end. I caught myself in the early hours [...]

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Poles on a plane

Zero excuse for this usually, but I’ve just flown to Blighty and back and I have to launch a bit of a rant about the behavior of Polish people on planes. Six months ago I would have gone on about ‘rudeness’ or ‘communist behavior’ but I’ve realized the reality comes down to just one thing: [...]

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