Poland: First Impressions

I never thought I’d go to Poland, but so far I like what I see. Among the things I’ve seen:

-Gorgeous women. Most of them smoke.

-Decorative buildings, but they’ve all been restored. (Hitler bombed the fuck out of Poland when he realized he was going to lose the war.)

-Kebab stands all over the place.

-Slavic languages all over the place (even Polish can sound beautiful).

-English is shockingly common. I try to use Polish as much as I can but soon remember how poor my listening and comprehension skills are.

-All the women think I’m Polish. To most of them I now say “Yes,” and then I put my faith into my…, anyway…

-The weather is nice, and much better than the -41 C Winnipeg is getting right now.

-Lots of construction going on. I think Euro 2012 is having a positive effect on Poland. It’s not routine maintenance they’re doing, they’re building and re-building.

But POLSKA POLSKA POLSKA! The language, though it sounds similar to Ukrainian, reading it is much harder. It really looks like a student, upset at translating Russian or Ukrainian into Latin back in the old days, took a pen and, in protest, slashed his way through every word in the dictionary, thus making his “own” language. I told this to one of the Polish girls at the hostel and she gasped, and then told me that Ukrainian was a funny language and then did her impression of it. Touche. On that note, Polish women have a good sense of humour.

Polish sounds similar to Ukrainian but is spoken as if it’s a mixture of Ukrainian and French. The little accents make the language difficult but by no means impossible to learn.

I don’t know about my health. Kebabs and medicinal vodka are the prima fooda, next up are kava (coffee) and sandwiches. I should be buying stuff from the market.

The hostel in Warsaw had 2 for 1 beers between 7 and 8. The beer’s not half bad, Krolewskie. And it was fun to talk to the hostel workers who knew all of the English slang and could teach me the Polish slang. It is here that I bought an English-Polish dictionary only to have one of the hostel workers declare that it was shit. Oh she is lucky she is cute.

And then there was that night I got hammered and met two Polish girls who ditched me and my buddy as soon as we got into the bar. Whoops. My charm works all over the world.

So those are my first impressions. We’ll see how they change over the next few weeks.