Having a tilt at Polishness
I'm genetically Polish, but born and educated in the UK, where I worked for 16 years. I've been in Poland since July 1997, and am keen to discover what aspects of Polishness are in the blood, and what aspects are the result of 45 years of communist uravnilovka. Observing my UK-born Polish friends who like me upped roots after Poland became free and comparing us to our age-group born in the PRL, I can differences and similarities.
Differences
We do not tolerate the rudeness, indifference and obstuctionism of public employees. Brought up in the ethos of an apolitical civil service who'd write letters to you signed 'Your Obedient Servant', we find dealing with Polish bureaucracy and its PRL-era mindset frustrating and painful.
Similarities
We take umbrage with similar ease; we are highly patriotic, we tend to keep close to the family.
I hope that with every year that passes between the end of communism and the present day, young Poles raised in a free market democracy will continue to push Poland towards normality in the negative respects, while Poland will continue to retain all its strong characteristics.
25 May, 2006
Polish State Railways and the high cost of social mistrust
Travelling by rail in England with my son recently, I marvelled at the contrast between the work of a ticket collector in Poland and the UK.
The British guard asked me courteously to see our tickets, and seeing that I had two, thanked me and moved on. He did not inspect them close up as they do in Poland. He did not ask to see any proof of my 10 year-old son's educational status or age.
His bosses work on the assumption that if someone's got a ticket, there's a 99% likelihood that the correct fare has been paid. The ticket inspection task is about revenue protection. The guard's after people travelling without a ticket.
In Poland... "Prosze o bilet!" A command rather than a request (though levels of courtesy at PKP's guards are rising). The ticket is inspected thoroughly. Any legitimacja is checked thoroughly. The legitimacja szkolna is a joke. When travelling with my son and I'm asked for his legitimacja my stock response is: "There is compulsory education in Poland ['obowiazek szkolny']. Parents who do not send their children to school are imprisoned. That I'm here and not behind bars implies that my son does go to school. So why the bit of paper to prove the obvious?
The upshot of over-checking tickets on PKP is that ticket inspectors do not focus on revenue protection. My line out of Warsaw, run by Koleje Mazowieckie, is an excellent example. At all the unmanned stations between Warszawa Zachodnia and Piaseczno, passengers are requested to board the train at the first compartment of the first carriage to buy their ticket. The guard writes tickets out manually. Our regular ticket - "One adult, two children, three bicycles, from Warszawa Dawidy to Czachowek Poludniowy, return, coming back today". The guard needs to check the number of kilometers between the two stations, check my children's legitimacje, work out the tariff (family discount, excursion discount), tot it all up and write out the ticket longhand. The ticket will cost something like 13.67 PLN, and he's always short of change, so he's fumbling through his pocket for tiny coins worth a fraction of a penny. By the time he's written the ticket, the train has passed two intermediate stations. From the back of the train, where they can travel safe in the knowledge that no guard will ever have time to control, dozens of people hop on and hop off, knowing there's very little chance they'll ever be asked to pay.
And revenues are lost, management thinks no one's using the trains, services are cut back to save money, trains are cut from eight carriages to four - because the most elemental thought process has not been carried out.
It's a social mistrust thing. Over-checking costs. Management distrusts its ticket inspectors, controllers control controllers, the cost of revenue protection must be out of all proportion to the revenues actually collected.
Have your tickets ready please - passengers at the rear of the train travel free.
(This train is the all stations to Skarzysko Kamienna from Warsaw, pictured between Warszawa Dawidy and Warszawa Jeziorki, 19 March 2006.)
Travelling by rail in England with my son recently, I marvelled at the contrast between the work of a ticket collector in Poland and the UK.
The British guard asked me courteously to see our tickets, and seeing that I had two, thanked me and moved on. He did not inspect them close up as they do in Poland. He did not ask to see any proof of my 10 year-old son's educational status or age.
His bosses work on the assumption that if someone's got a ticket, there's a 99% likelihood that the correct fare has been paid. The ticket inspection task is about revenue protection. The guard's after people travelling without a ticket.
In Poland... "Prosze o bilet!" A command rather than a request (though levels of courtesy at PKP's guards are rising). The ticket is inspected thoroughly. Any legitimacja is checked thoroughly. The legitimacja szkolna is a joke. When travelling with my son and I'm asked for his legitimacja my stock response is: "There is compulsory education in Poland ['obowiazek szkolny']. Parents who do not send their children to school are imprisoned. That I'm here and not behind bars implies that my son does go to school. So why the bit of paper to prove the obvious?
The upshot of over-checking tickets on PKP is that ticket inspectors do not focus on revenue protection. My line out of Warsaw, run by Koleje Mazowieckie, is an excellent example. At all the unmanned stations between Warszawa Zachodnia and Piaseczno, passengers are requested to board the train at the first compartment of the first carriage to buy their ticket. The guard writes tickets out manually. Our regular ticket - "One adult, two children, three bicycles, from Warszawa Dawidy to Czachowek Poludniowy, return, coming back today". The guard needs to check the number of kilometers between the two stations, check my children's legitimacje, work out the tariff (family discount, excursion discount), tot it all up and write out the ticket longhand. The ticket will cost something like 13.67 PLN, and he's always short of change, so he's fumbling through his pocket for tiny coins worth a fraction of a penny. By the time he's written the ticket, the train has passed two intermediate stations. From the back of the train, where they can travel safe in the knowledge that no guard will ever have time to control, dozens of people hop on and hop off, knowing there's very little chance they'll ever be asked to pay.
And revenues are lost, management thinks no one's using the trains, services are cut back to save money, trains are cut from eight carriages to four - because the most elemental thought process has not been carried out.
It's a social mistrust thing. Over-checking costs. Management distrusts its ticket inspectors, controllers control controllers, the cost of revenue protection must be out of all proportion to the revenues actually collected.
Have your tickets ready please - passengers at the rear of the train travel free.
(This train is the all stations to Skarzysko Kamienna from Warsaw, pictured between Warszawa Dawidy and Warszawa Jeziorki, 19 March 2006.)
Like a German in Alte Breslau
My first visit to Lwów/L'viv/Lvov/Lemberg was a deeply emotional affair. Since childhood Saturday mornings at Polish school in west London, 40 years ago, where we learnt of this city, torn away from Poland by the Yalta betrayal, Lwów has had a powerful hold on my imagination.
In the post-war Polish emigre communities in the UK, Lwów was everywhere. The stained-glass windows of Polish churches in Chiswick and Manchester with the crest of Lwów 'Semper Fidelis', the Koło Lwowian - the association of old Poles from Lwów that many of my parents' friends belonged to - my scout cub troop, named Orlęta Lwowskie (Lwów eaglets) for the children that took part in the fighting for a Polish Lwow in 1920, Lwów was as Polish as kiełbasa, bigos, krakowiak and polonez.
Communist Poland had a different shape to the pre-war maps adorning the living room walls of patriotic Poles living in West London. One day, Poland would be free. Would it revert to it's pre-war shape? Every Sunday, at the end of Mass we sang "Boże Coś Polske" in our churches: the last line - which still brings goose-pimples when I think about it - "Ojczyznę wolna, rać nam wrócić Panie." It occurred to me that so many people - praying so intently, for so long, for something to happen - it would happen. Even though in the darkest days it looked like the Evil Empire was there to stay and Poland's chances for independence were negligible.
But what about the borders of a free Poland? In the 1980s, opinions differed. I had a heated argument with Ryszard Czarnecki, today a leading light in the populist Samoobrona party, in the pub garden of the Haven Arms in Ealing Broadway in 1987. He called me a 'sprzedawczyk' (sell-out artist) for suggesting that a free Poland should not include a Lwów and a Wilno, but should retain the post-1945 borders. I argued that any claims that Poland might have for these two cities would be mirrored by German claims for Breslau, Stettin, Allenstein, Kolberg etc. And while Poland today is smaller than it was in 1939 by more than the size of Belgium and Denmark combined, it is now central rather than eastern Europe, ethnically homogenous and more industrial.
Visiting Lwów does leave me with an ambivalent feeling though. The saying that 'every cobblestone in Lwow is steeped in Polish history' rings true. The streets, cathedrals, churches, pre-war, pre-Partition Polish buildings, make the city feel every bit as Polish as Kraków. And it's larger than Kraków. While the Piast dynasty's Poland did not originally include Lwów, the city had been Polish for the best part of half a millennium. As I walked the pavements my forebears walked, I felt just like a German must feel in the Stary Rynek of Wrocław.
The sights are a marvel. There's a certain old house, where the drainpipes on one side feed rainwater into the Baltic while the drainpipes on the other feed rainwater into the Black Sea. The old cemetary chapel with its polychromed bas-reliefs. The Armenian cathedral. The dilapadated factories on the edge of the cities.
But ultimately, Lwów must stay Ukrainian. Poland needs good neighbours to the east. A strong, free and friendly Ukraine is crucial if Russia - which has had its fair share of leaders with bisyllabic names ending in '-in' - is not to threaten Poland's raison d'etat.
And while Poles will continue feeling strong sentiment for Lwów, the countryside around had never really been 'Polish'. It looks and feels different. Huge post-collective farm prairies rather than the narrow strips of Polish villages. Even before the deportations, ethnic cleansing and further deportations, the proportion of ethnic Poles living in the countryside around Lwow was low. My mother's childhood memories square with this.
Is this 1945? No, 2006. The old market square, L'viv.
My first visit to Lwów/L'viv/Lvov/Lemberg was a deeply emotional affair. Since childhood Saturday mornings at Polish school in west London, 40 years ago, where we learnt of this city, torn away from Poland by the Yalta betrayal, Lwów has had a powerful hold on my imagination.
In the post-war Polish emigre communities in the UK, Lwów was everywhere. The stained-glass windows of Polish churches in Chiswick and Manchester with the crest of Lwów 'Semper Fidelis', the Koło Lwowian - the association of old Poles from Lwów that many of my parents' friends belonged to - my scout cub troop, named Orlęta Lwowskie (Lwów eaglets) for the children that took part in the fighting for a Polish Lwow in 1920, Lwów was as Polish as kiełbasa, bigos, krakowiak and polonez.
Communist Poland had a different shape to the pre-war maps adorning the living room walls of patriotic Poles living in West London. One day, Poland would be free. Would it revert to it's pre-war shape? Every Sunday, at the end of Mass we sang "Boże Coś Polske" in our churches: the last line - which still brings goose-pimples when I think about it - "Ojczyznę wolna, rać nam wrócić Panie." It occurred to me that so many people - praying so intently, for so long, for something to happen - it would happen. Even though in the darkest days it looked like the Evil Empire was there to stay and Poland's chances for independence were negligible.
But what about the borders of a free Poland? In the 1980s, opinions differed. I had a heated argument with Ryszard Czarnecki, today a leading light in the populist Samoobrona party, in the pub garden of the Haven Arms in Ealing Broadway in 1987. He called me a 'sprzedawczyk' (sell-out artist) for suggesting that a free Poland should not include a Lwów and a Wilno, but should retain the post-1945 borders. I argued that any claims that Poland might have for these two cities would be mirrored by German claims for Breslau, Stettin, Allenstein, Kolberg etc. And while Poland today is smaller than it was in 1939 by more than the size of Belgium and Denmark combined, it is now central rather than eastern Europe, ethnically homogenous and more industrial.
Visiting Lwów does leave me with an ambivalent feeling though. The saying that 'every cobblestone in Lwow is steeped in Polish history' rings true. The streets, cathedrals, churches, pre-war, pre-Partition Polish buildings, make the city feel every bit as Polish as Kraków. And it's larger than Kraków. While the Piast dynasty's Poland did not originally include Lwów, the city had been Polish for the best part of half a millennium. As I walked the pavements my forebears walked, I felt just like a German must feel in the Stary Rynek of Wrocław.
The sights are a marvel. There's a certain old house, where the drainpipes on one side feed rainwater into the Baltic while the drainpipes on the other feed rainwater into the Black Sea. The old cemetary chapel with its polychromed bas-reliefs. The Armenian cathedral. The dilapadated factories on the edge of the cities.
But ultimately, Lwów must stay Ukrainian. Poland needs good neighbours to the east. A strong, free and friendly Ukraine is crucial if Russia - which has had its fair share of leaders with bisyllabic names ending in '-in' - is not to threaten Poland's raison d'etat.
And while Poles will continue feeling strong sentiment for Lwów, the countryside around had never really been 'Polish'. It looks and feels different. Huge post-collective farm prairies rather than the narrow strips of Polish villages. Even before the deportations, ethnic cleansing and further deportations, the proportion of ethnic Poles living in the countryside around Lwow was low. My mother's childhood memories square with this.
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Is this 1945? No, 2006. The old market square, L'viv.
03 September, 2005
Remembering Poland's contribution to the Battle of BritainThe 2005 Radom Air Show, took place the month before the 65th Anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Time to remember that Polish pilots destroyed one in eight German aircraft shot down over South East England during the battle. Krakow air museum's Spitfire LF Mk XVIE, representing 308 (Polish) Sqn's aircract TB995, ZF*O, was on display.
The Red Arrows made their second appearance in Poland at the 2005 Radom Air Show, and were greeted with great enthusiasm by the 140,000-strong crowd. Below, the Red Arrows' BAE Systems Hawks pass overhead in Diamond Nine formation. The RAF team were without doubt the stars of this year's show - although individual performances by F-16s from four NATO air forces were highly impressive, as was a Polish air force MiG-29 and a French Mirage 2000.
Bottom: A Dutch F-16 climbs steeply after deploying flares
22 August, 2005
The Orthodox Church at the Edge of Europe
On Sunday, my wife and I left Warsaw bright and early and headed along Route 637 to the Belarusian border. We passed the large military zone just east of Warsaw, where in days gone by the Czarist army and later the Red Army could park itself in case of potential unrest. The 637 is the old road, built by the Czar, upgraded by the Soviets post-1945, allowing rapid deployment of Russian forces from the border into Warsaw. Just eight years ago, the road surface was still in relatively good condition; today, it's deteriorated, and traffic along the road, passing through towns like Wegrow and Sokolow Podlaski, does not warrant the big zloties needed to keep it maintained to armoured fighting vehicle standard.
Traffic used to be light, with many stolen cars from the west heading for a porous border before making their way to the used car markets further east. The border's slammed shut on that enterprise today; the few cars with foreign number plates are clearly tourists. Sokolow has become a prosperous town thanks to its meat processing factory and other recent investments. Beyond Sokolow, what little traffic there was falls away.
Next we cross the River Bug, marking the September 1939 - June 1941 border between the Third Reich and the USSR. Signs of Soviet occupation of the far side of the River Bug remain in the form of numerous concrete bunkers, there to keep Stalin's erstwhile allies at bay. On to Drohiczyn, a small town of three Baroque churches, sandy beaches on the shores of the Bug, and an underdeveloped tourist presence for such a picturesque location. Here, one can take a riverboat trip on a Soviet-built craft reminscent of the boat in 'Apocalypse Now', only painted grey. Price 7PLN (less than two bucks/euros, just over a pound) for around 30 minutes.
As one heads east, so the villages take on a different character, with more wooden buildings in various states of decay, some, though gaily painted and well-maintained despite their antiquity. Here, in villages such as Slochy Annopolskie, one can hear Belarusian spoken in the streets by old folk, sitting on benches outside the houses, erected there so the dwellers could sit and chat with passers-by.
Crossing the main north-south Bialystok-Lublin road, the countryside acquires a borderlands character. Some five km east of the crossroads, you pass under the railway line from Hajnowka in the Bielowieza forest (home of the European bison) to Warsaw. We're now less than 20km from the border. Forests line both sides of the road. Three more villages lie along the way, the last of which, Adamowo, is a pumping and gas storage terminal for the pipeline that runs from the Siberian oilfields through Belarusia and Poland on to western Europe. Adamowo also houses a sizeable garrison of border defence troops. One final crossroads, beyond which is a 'No entry except for local traffic' sign; we're now two kilometers from Europe's eastern frontier.
There's a reason for going on; the Orthodox church at Tokary, a village arbitralily divided after 1945 by the Polish-Soviet (today Polish-Belarusian) border. The wooden church, painted bright pale blue, was built in 1912 . Sited among trees, a little way off the road which ends at a red-and-white barrier and a sign saying 'National Border', the church is surrounded by old, large wooden Orthodox crosses with ribbons tied to the them.
I asked a man if the service had started. It was 11:05 am; "Is this the eleven o'clock service?" I asked. "No, the nine o'clock". We went inside; a splendid iconstasis, women on the left, men on the right, average age, 70; angelic singing in harmony that makes Catholic church song seem banal and crude in comparison. The hymn lasted maybe 10-15 minutes, repeating the same four-line verse-chorus many many times.
Bicycles in the churchyard had cyrillic names, presumably relics from the times before Lukashenka tightened the screws and Poland joined the EU, when local villagers could freely cross the border. Older people spoke Belarusian. The Pop (Orthodox priest) looked young; in his mid-20s, beardless, but with a black pony-tail and floor-length clerical robe.
The service over, people visited the miraculous well outside the church for some healing water before heading off home.
A beautiful visit to a different age; pity that half of the congregation consisted of tourists... [like us...]
15 August, 2005
Polish beer: Not great news for foreign beer lovers.
Eight years ago, you could still find good Polish beers, they seem to be disappearing. The Polish breweries are now mostly foreign owned (SAB Miller, Carlsberg, Heineken have snapped up the big brands and dominate the market), the few local independent breweries have fallen on hard times.
What's available tends to be sweet and heavy like a late-August afternoon; sunny, humid, with more than a hint of thunder, plenty of fruity smells in the air.
Wherever Poles take their beer, there's always large plastic bottles of fruit syrops about. If an Englishman asked for a large dash of raspberry syrop in his beer, he'd be rightly considered a poof. Here, you'll see many a shaven headed, muscle-bound type knocking back the Tyskie, the Zywiec or the Lech discoloured by some syropy, sugary goo.
The beer companies have not been slow to spot this, and have launched their own sugary fruit-flavour concoctions - beers like Redd's, FreeQ, Gingers. And mainstream beers have become sweeter. New launches, like the 'English style' beer 'Dog in the Fog', posing as a 'smooth beer' (one thinks draughtflow beers like Boddingtons), turn out to be ghastly in taste. Even the much-praised Perla from Lublin, said to have a strongly hoppy flavour, lacks hops. If you like hoppy beers, try the German Jever pils.
And so after eight years in Poland my quaffs of choice are not Polish, but Czech - Pilsner Urquell or Ukrainian Obolon's wheat beer.
Eight years ago, you could still find good Polish beers, they seem to be disappearing. The Polish breweries are now mostly foreign owned (SAB Miller, Carlsberg, Heineken have snapped up the big brands and dominate the market), the few local independent breweries have fallen on hard times.
What's available tends to be sweet and heavy like a late-August afternoon; sunny, humid, with more than a hint of thunder, plenty of fruity smells in the air.
Wherever Poles take their beer, there's always large plastic bottles of fruit syrops about. If an Englishman asked for a large dash of raspberry syrop in his beer, he'd be rightly considered a poof. Here, you'll see many a shaven headed, muscle-bound type knocking back the Tyskie, the Zywiec or the Lech discoloured by some syropy, sugary goo.
The beer companies have not been slow to spot this, and have launched their own sugary fruit-flavour concoctions - beers like Redd's, FreeQ, Gingers. And mainstream beers have become sweeter. New launches, like the 'English style' beer 'Dog in the Fog', posing as a 'smooth beer' (one thinks draughtflow beers like Boddingtons), turn out to be ghastly in taste. Even the much-praised Perla from Lublin, said to have a strongly hoppy flavour, lacks hops. If you like hoppy beers, try the German Jever pils.
And so after eight years in Poland my quaffs of choice are not Polish, but Czech - Pilsner Urquell or Ukrainian Obolon's wheat beer.
14 August, 2005
Manners are different in Poland to those found in the UK.
This is a brusque country in which expressions such as 'please', 'thank you' or 'sorry' in public are seen rather as a sign of weakness in the person saying it, attempting to ingratiate himself to a shopkeeper, bus driver or bank clerk. Requests should be replaced with commands. "I'm telling you what to do, you do it".
Britain, which has a greater sense of social harmony, is also a country where people 'know their place'. In Poland, the bus driver and bricklayer had been led to believe, during communism, that their social worth is at least that of a university lecturer, doctor or lawyer.
As such, every exchange, routine request, becomes an elemental struggle to see who's top dog. This daily series of biological contests for dominance become quite tiring after a while (especially if you're not one of nature's 'alphas'), and one hankers for the gentility of British social intercourse.
An example:
[at London Victoria Coach Station:]
Me: "Excuse me, do you have phone cards, please?"
Assistant: "I'm terribly sorry, but we don't carry them. Why not try the newsagents, just around the corner. They sell a wide range of cards."
Me: "Thank you very much".
[at Sopot railway station:]
Me: "Do you take credit cards?" (Sopot being Poland's premier seaside resort town)
Ticket saleswoman: "No."
And that's the end of the dialogue. No attempt on her part to tell me that there's a cash machine up the street 50 metres away, no expressions of regret or apology, no attempt to sympathise with my cashless predicament.
[at our local shop:]
Me: "Can I buy a one day travel card, please"
Shopkeeper: 'Nie ma' (lit. 'there aren't any', with sneering undertone of 'bugger off').
Driving in Poland is a similar picture. Never mind that the average age of cars is more than double that in the UK and that the roads are shabby, pot-holed, ill-lit, not up to the traffic on them, these things could all be overcome if Polish drivers displayed more common courtesy.
In Britain, if you are indicating to change lanes, the guy behind will automatically let you in. Ditto turning into a major road. In Poland, if you wish to change lanes, the other guy will speed up just to prevent you from getting in front of him. Leaving a safe gap between you and the car in front in Poland is an open invitation for another driver to nip in, creating a dangerously small gap between the three cars.
The Darwinism of the Road
The driver of a BMW 7 Series believes he's superior to the driver of a Toyota Avensis, who believes he's superior to the driver of a Ford Focus, who believes he's superior to the driver of an Opel Corsa; all believe they are superior to the driver of a Fiat Seicento, who beneath him has the driver of the Fiat 126P 'Maluch' to hold in contempt. And at the top of the tree is the driver of a Porsche Cayenne, VW Tourag or Jeep Grand Commander (latest shape with darkened rear windows).
In other words, it's the law of the jungle again, the constant daily struggle for one-upmanship, for getting one over one's fellow citizen.
This all results from a lack of trust in Polish society. No one trusts anybody. Citizen does not trust government. Tax authorities do not trust tax payers. Employees do not trust their employers. Neighbour does not trust neighbour. This is in contrast with Britain, where levels of social trust and harmony are far higher. One does not need to look too far for an explanation; 45 years of communism, constant invasions and foreign rule. This is all in the past now; Poles now need to work harder to be pleasant and polite to one another.
As my cousin said, "Whenever you meet a polite, cultured, well-dressed, well-groomed man, it always turns out he's a queer'.
This is a brusque country in which expressions such as 'please', 'thank you' or 'sorry' in public are seen rather as a sign of weakness in the person saying it, attempting to ingratiate himself to a shopkeeper, bus driver or bank clerk. Requests should be replaced with commands. "I'm telling you what to do, you do it".
Britain, which has a greater sense of social harmony, is also a country where people 'know their place'. In Poland, the bus driver and bricklayer had been led to believe, during communism, that their social worth is at least that of a university lecturer, doctor or lawyer.
As such, every exchange, routine request, becomes an elemental struggle to see who's top dog. This daily series of biological contests for dominance become quite tiring after a while (especially if you're not one of nature's 'alphas'), and one hankers for the gentility of British social intercourse.
An example:
[at London Victoria Coach Station:]
Me: "Excuse me, do you have phone cards, please?"
Assistant: "I'm terribly sorry, but we don't carry them. Why not try the newsagents, just around the corner. They sell a wide range of cards."
Me: "Thank you very much".
[at Sopot railway station:]
Me: "Do you take credit cards?" (Sopot being Poland's premier seaside resort town)
Ticket saleswoman: "No."
And that's the end of the dialogue. No attempt on her part to tell me that there's a cash machine up the street 50 metres away, no expressions of regret or apology, no attempt to sympathise with my cashless predicament.
[at our local shop:]
Me: "Can I buy a one day travel card, please"
Shopkeeper: 'Nie ma' (lit. 'there aren't any', with sneering undertone of 'bugger off').
Driving in Poland is a similar picture. Never mind that the average age of cars is more than double that in the UK and that the roads are shabby, pot-holed, ill-lit, not up to the traffic on them, these things could all be overcome if Polish drivers displayed more common courtesy.
In Britain, if you are indicating to change lanes, the guy behind will automatically let you in. Ditto turning into a major road. In Poland, if you wish to change lanes, the other guy will speed up just to prevent you from getting in front of him. Leaving a safe gap between you and the car in front in Poland is an open invitation for another driver to nip in, creating a dangerously small gap between the three cars.
The Darwinism of the Road
The driver of a BMW 7 Series believes he's superior to the driver of a Toyota Avensis, who believes he's superior to the driver of a Ford Focus, who believes he's superior to the driver of an Opel Corsa; all believe they are superior to the driver of a Fiat Seicento, who beneath him has the driver of the Fiat 126P 'Maluch' to hold in contempt. And at the top of the tree is the driver of a Porsche Cayenne, VW Tourag or Jeep Grand Commander (latest shape with darkened rear windows).
In other words, it's the law of the jungle again, the constant daily struggle for one-upmanship, for getting one over one's fellow citizen.
This all results from a lack of trust in Polish society. No one trusts anybody. Citizen does not trust government. Tax authorities do not trust tax payers. Employees do not trust their employers. Neighbour does not trust neighbour. This is in contrast with Britain, where levels of social trust and harmony are far higher. One does not need to look too far for an explanation; 45 years of communism, constant invasions and foreign rule. This is all in the past now; Poles now need to work harder to be pleasant and polite to one another.
As my cousin said, "Whenever you meet a polite, cultured, well-dressed, well-groomed man, it always turns out he's a queer'.
Some catching up to do
How long will it take Poland to catch up economically with western Europe?
How can a civil society be quickly created, without losing Poland's positive national characteristics?
I've been living in Warsaw for eight years, and can see many areas of life which have got better for the Polish citizen, especially retail, telecoms and banking; others remain almost unchanged - road infrastructure, health care. Rail services have got worse.
To quote The Economist (5 August 2005), the difference between government pulling its finger out and doing what needs to be done equates to Poland catching up with western Europe in our lifetimes - or our children's lifetimes.
How long will it take Poland to catch up economically with western Europe?
How can a civil society be quickly created, without losing Poland's positive national characteristics?
I've been living in Warsaw for eight years, and can see many areas of life which have got better for the Polish citizen, especially retail, telecoms and banking; others remain almost unchanged - road infrastructure, health care. Rail services have got worse.
To quote The Economist (5 August 2005), the difference between government pulling its finger out and doing what needs to be done equates to Poland catching up with western Europe in our lifetimes - or our children's lifetimes.
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