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plicably 30 meters back from the road this is one example on ul jozefa sarego but i know of three or four others not enough to constitute a style but enough to make you wonder why and how it happened 1 was a building in the street destroyed and there happened to be another building behind it unlikely it s too close 2 did the architect want a garden in front of his project why so rare 3 are these survivors of older development also unlikely since they look like there were built at the same time as the surrounding developments late 19th century early 20th any ideas learn more fascinating facts about krakow past and present posted in uncategorized 20 comments i m back baby march 31 2008 by jamie stokes the passport control officer responded to my cheery dzień dobry with a perfectly impassive blank stare and i knew i was back seven days home in the curry nation and i had become accustomed to those odd quirks of british culture such as responding to greetings and occasionally smiling never mind i know the score it s a culture thing and i even found it oddly comforting by the way and this is not leading to a rant i promise i ve discovered an ever more benighted and extreme species of official polish rudeness than post office workers not possible try dropping into your local kantor currency exchange i ve been in scores of these places over the years and i can wholeheartedly say that i ve never come across a more morose taciturn and robotic form of human being anywhere else i ve never experienced a hello a smile a thank you or any other kind of human communication from these people in fact i m not convinced i ve ever seen one of them open their mouths at all perhaps they re some kind of specially bred mute species i tell i lie one of them did speak to me once he was an an absurdly orange victim of excessive solarium use and he told me that he couldn t exchange my money because it wasn t clean enough my how i laughed me and the lady a went to east grinstead lindfield and bath i ate about four pigs worth of bacon and pork sausages in the form of english breakfasts i bathed in fine local ales learn to make proper beer in poland for god s sake we glided about the place in pristine trains my god trains have improved in the uk recently we fell in love just that little irrevocable bit more played with nieces hung around in ancient church yards and generally had a fine old time i genuinely loath looking at other people s holiday pictures but am completely incapable of resisting the temptation of inflicting the same thing on other people weird bots people the author seriously considering how much trouble he would be in for diving into the ancient roman baths of bath english sky english city a house on the kennet and avon canal i was going to buy it until i remembered my fear of swans a grave in an english church yard the inscription read sacred to the memory of mr charles hawkins who was overtaken by the inevitable fate of mortals and released from pain and affliction on the 26th day of may 1789 aged 60 years good luck to him a wonders why we can t build straight buildings in england never fear i will return to rock hard social commentary soon yawn posted in personal 14 comments the central mystery of the polish character possibly march 14 2008 by jamie stokes i feel i m getting close to the central mystery of the polish character i m probably completely wrong in this belief but it makes me feel better so humour me i ve written recently about the strange behaviour of polish people on pavements and on the road i ve written that i m very confused by the way that polish people seem to wander around in a daze without any awareness of the people around them and about the way that they drive as if they were the only person on the road i m starting to get the feeling that both of these things point to a fundamental feature of the polish psyche walking down an average polish street i observe polish people trying to walk through each other it s almost as if they literally cannot see the people around them or if they can see them they treat them as ghosts of some kind when people look into your eyes it s with an expression of suspicion for a long time i thought it was just me they were looking at this way that my foreigness was somehow obvious from my appearance but i don t believe that any more polish people look at other polish people with just the same latent suspicion they look at me with nobody trusts anybody everybody expects everybody else to be a bastard i got a cold feeling down my spine when i finally saw this i remember some wise person making a comment on one of my posts somewhere that said something like all polish people believe that all other polish people are idiots anti semites drunks thieves or religious maniacs apart from the ones they know in other words the average pole wouldn t trust another pole as far as he could throw him unless he was part of his extended family or clique of friends if i meet an englishman i ve never met before my default position is positive i m expecting him to be a decent honest bloke when a pole meets a pole he s never met before it seems the default assumption is precisely the opposite i find that kind of scary it explains a lot people who work in shops are rude because they assume you re an idiot or a thief people fail to get out of each other s way on the pavement because they assume the other person is a rude and uncivilized person and they are damned if they are going to give way to a rude and uncivilized person people drive as if they were blind because they literally have no respect for the lives or limbs of the inferior people around them it can t be that simple can it posted in personal poland polish tagged polish character 97 comments peripheral vision or crazy ivan ii march 5 2008 by jamie stokes i ve made a breakthrough observation which might explain the crazy ivan phenomenon i described a while ago for those of you who can t be bothered to look back at the original post the crazy ivan phenomenon can be summarized as this when walking down the street polish people frequently and randomly stop and or suddenly reverse direction almost invariably straight into the person walking behind or beside them i ve been puzzling over this strange behavior for months yesterday the warmth of the false spring we ve been experiencing down here in krakow for the past couple of weeks slipped away in the night and the snows came back polish people instantly wrapped themselves in padded coats scarves hats and fur boots as is their want even though it was nowhere near cold enough to justify such sartorial extravagance i noticed immediately that the incidence of crazy ivan encounters shot up this was the breakthrough when you re wearing a hat and a woolly scarf and a voluminous hood you just can t see or hear anything going on around you hence you don t know anyone is behind or beside you hence you have no idea you will walk straight into them if you suddenly change direction in other words you have no peripheral vision i m slightly disappointed of course this only explains the walking into people part of the phenomenon it doesn t explain exactly why these people so frequently find the need to suddenly veer of in a different direction or start walking backwards one day i will understand posted in polish 3 comments dvd folly february 29 2008 by jamie stokes 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 and a couple of randomly selected movies from the local dvd shop months ago we accidentally and fortunately stumbled upon the piracki video shop on ul lea it s about 10 minutes walk from where i live has a pretty good selection of movies and foreigners are treated as fellow human beings even if they can t say i m returning this in polish there s none of this tedious messing about with laminated membership cards and whatnot they take a note of your name and address on trust and that s it it s like being in the cosa nostra no questions asked you come in choose a dvd give a nod and a wave to the lass behind the desk and that s it admittedly if you bring a dvd back late they send big stefan round to break your legs but it s a small price to pay for the day to day level of service we were very happy there for six months or so then one fateful day we wandered down a different street and were hypnotized by the pull of a mega hit nowy dvd shop called beverly hills video can you imagine getting away with a name like beverly hills video in the uk conjures images of three armenian cousins renting slightly worn chinese copied dvds on kentish town road to me in poland it s the acme of cool and trendy weekend entertainment there are dozens of them across the country kind of similar to what blockbuster used to be in the uk the place is nicely laid out professionally decorated well stocked and in the final analysis absolutely awful we joined for three or four weeks we went there every friday and wandered around its isles and isles of cruddy movies we tried hard to believe that we were having a good time trawling through the acres and acres of meaningless titles involving ninjas commandos strike force 9s and phat chicks but in the end we had to come to terms with the fact that they they didn t actually have any woody allen movies at all not to mention the fact that we just didn t like the place on any level despite it s cooler full of blue energy drinks and the opportunity to buy chilled wine this week the full horror of our error finally broke upon us and we resolved to return to piracki video to face the music i won t say we weren t afraid because we were would they accept us back into the fold could we fool them by casually mentioning an imaginary month long holiday to the caribbean despite our pasty polish winter complexions would they smell the evil scent of beverly hills video on our clothes and cast us forever into the outer darkness these and other questions troubled us and quelled conversation as we made our way up ul lea last friday evening at precisely 18 17 we swept into the place with breath held and barely daring to glance in the direction of the rental desk the lass behind the desk rose and broke into a massive grin she spread her arms and more or less embraced us with a kiss on each cheek waves of relief and nostalgia swept over us we spent an hour wandering around the 50 square meter shop grinning like fools and reveling in the sensation of familiarity i feel like i came home said the lady a and i for one knew exactly what she meant posted in krakow personal 11 comments developments are afoot february 25 2008 by jamie stokes 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 off the street and gave them a computer oh and i m on there too get over there immediately you re probably missing something new and exciting right now posted in poland 5 comments shiny sparkly things february 20 2008 by jamie stokes 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 in my place many of them are of questionable taste and all of them are made of cheap plastic and go beep a lot the world s most absurd shower is so far the peak of this trend i wouldn t mind if he insisted on foisting a 42 inch plasma screen on me but no i get a remote controlled shower that plays radio maria at you and allows you to answer the phone whilst soaping your armpits i m not kidding this thing is incredible it has three different lights in it including a bank of blinking blue leds very tasteful a radio that seemed to be permanently tuned to christian talk shows and a dozen different nozzles that can spurt water in unexpected places without warning i have all of these things turned off all of the time apart from when i m showing off it s absurdity to visitors pan landlord loves all this stuff and is immensely proud of the world s most absurd shower he insists on looking in on it whenever he comes round sometimes he invents reasons to come round just so that he can have a peak at it he s also immensely proud of the fact that it s made in poland a characteristic that fills me with vague uneasiness in the context of a water filled device plugged into the electrical main perhaps i m being unfair poland is full of these immensely tasteless and tacky bits of gimcrack lamps that play chopin when you turn them on clocks adorned with illuminated cuckoos rotating plastic statuettes of jesus and a million other products of the fevered neo capitalist mind you can understand their appeal for a generation that grew up in the grey and non shiny era of the 60s and 70s but the tide of new money has fueled an alarming explosion of these things one day they ll be worth a fortune as examples of early 21st century kitsch have to go now my doorbell is playing number 3 of 16 random melodies and if i don t get to it within 30 seconds i may be compelled to blow my brains out posted in personal poland 11 comments it s my birthday february 15 2008 by jamie stokes 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 head and yes i do still wear the outfit occasionally posted in personal 17 comments older posts twitter feed why an error has occurred the feed is probably down try again later recent posts polandian architectural oddities of krakow 2 bricks bricks bricks architectural oddities of krakow 1 mind the gap i m back baby the central mystery of the polish character possibly top posts the central mystery of the polish character possibly archive september 2008 april 2008 march 2008 february 2008 january 2008 december 2007 november 2007 october 2007 september 2007 august 2007 july 2007 meta create account log in entries feed comments feed wordpress com create a free website or blog at wordpress com wpthemes wyspianski unwinding blog at wordpress com subscribe subscribed wyspianski unwinding sign me up already have a wordpress com account log in now privacy wyspianski unwinding subscribe subscribed sign up log in report this content view site in reader manage 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