DVD Folly

Friday night is DVD night for me and the lady. I guess we should be out raving at the local chav pit but I’m far too old and the lady A is far too polite to mention the fact. Besides, there’s nothing better than a Friday evening in with a bottle or two of vino [...]

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Developments are afoot

Nagging sense of boredom? Feeling tired, listless, and torpid? What you need is New Improved Polandian (now with added zing!) Polandian is a new collaborative blog all about Poland. We sought out the funniest, wittiest, and cleverest people blogging about Poland… and then discovered that we couldn’t afford them, so we just got some bums [...]

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Shiny sparkly things

My landlord just installed The World’s Most Absurd Shower in my flat. My landlord is a top bloke and I won’t hear a word said against him, but he does have a terrible weakness for shiny sparkly gadgets. His wife doesn’t let him play with them at home so he’s constantly installing wildly impractical thingamajigs [...]

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It’s my birthday!

Yes, the day after Valentine’s. That’s a lot of years of receiving cards in the mail and wondering if they are one or the other. They’re always the other. Anyway. It’s my birthday! You may now heap adulation upon me. Me; thirty something *mumble* *mumble* years ago. Yes I am wearing a handkerchief on my [...]

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Domofon etiquette

A domofon is what an English-speaker would call an entry phone. Domofons are ubiquitous in Polish towns and cities where almost everyone lives in apartment buildings of one kind or another. I’ve had a domofon in every place I’ve ever lived in Poland. On the face of it they are handy devices that allow people [...]

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Islam in Poland?

Wandering around Krakow the other day I happened to glance up at the roof line of a building I’ve passed a hundred times and noticed that it had an unusual feature. Perched on the sky line were three towers that looked for all the world like minarets, and the middle one was unmistakably a platform [...]

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Polish language snobbery

Another thing that’s bothered me for a long time, and there do seem to be a worrying number of things-that-have-bothered-me-for-a-long-time, is the Polish obsession with correct grammar. It’s very common to hear Polish people laughing at or criticizing other Polish people because of the way they speak Polish. I find this very odd. I once [...]

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