the POLSKI blog

Or do you? It’s a commonn misconception that you need to pay to use the loo in Poland. Yes, maybe in some places, but not everywhere.

In the past, most places, including restaurants and bars, would have toilet attendants who’d charge you a small set fee to enter the loo (and in some cases provide you with some toilet paper too). The attendants would most likely be female pensioners, hence their nickname, “babcia klozetowa” (literally: “toilet grandma”). But they were there not just to charge you money. They kept the place clean, provided a sense of security and often became, inadvertently of course, a source of entertainment. They’d sit there with their tiny AM radios, crocheting or knitting, loudly gossipping away, keeping an eye on their customers and often telling them off if they broke any of their golden loo rules.

Obviously they are not – and have never been – a typical Polish phenomenon. And neither has been the custom of charging for the toilet. But somehow many people still think that unless you have some lose change in your pocket, your only option when you’re desperate for the loo in Poland is the nearest park.

Chargeable toilets and toilet attendants are probably still present in some places – mainly, I would suspect, railway stations and other busy public transport hubs. But over the past several years I have not encountered them in any of the shopping centres, cinemas, restaurants or bars I have visited in Poland.

But I’m glad they have been immortalised in popular Polish culture.

I’m also glad we got thir particular subject out of the way.

→  More Polish Facts and Myths

Image © Iwona Kellie, used under the Creative Commons licence
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Kocham Cię. I love you.

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More language of love – here.

More “Polish your Polish” – here.

Kocham Cie image by Funky Tee, via Flickr, used under the CC licenceTweet

Go on, admit it. You’ve ALWAYS wanted to impress your friends with a Polish tongue twister. Right?

And if you think “She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore” is difficult, try these. Here is my top five.

Let’s start with one of the most difficult pieces of Polish literature, a short poem by Jan Brzechwa, called “Chrząszcz” (“Beetle”). Actually, it’s just the opening line of the poem – about a beetle buzzing in reed in the town of Szczebrzeszyn – that has become probably the most famous Polish tongue twister ever:

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.

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And how was that? I bet you’ve never seen so many consonants in one sentence in your life! The next one is also full of them, but this time it’s more about ‘s’ vs. ‘sz’:

W czasie suszy szosa sucha.

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Which translates as “The road is dry during a drought”. Was that any easier?

How about this one, which uses rather long and complex words to covey a rather simple message – “We isolated ourselves from an enthusiastic crowd”:

Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.

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The next one makes many people cheat. Sorry, simplify things. Why would you say:

Stół z powyłamywanymi nogami.

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which means “A table with its legs broken out”, when you can just say:

Stół bez nóg.

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“A table with no legs.” Cheeky. But not as cheeky as the last tongue twister in my collection, which plays tricks on your tongue, but also on your brain.

Alliteration occurs when all words in a phrase or a sentence start with the same letter. This nonsensical tongue twister means “Tooth, tooth soup. Oak, oak soup.” But try to fool your brain and make it forget about the alliteration in the first half of the tongue twister. Now say it really fast:

Ząb, zupa zębowa. Dąb, zupa dębowa.

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If you managed to fool your brain (and your tongue) – well done. If not, I’ll let you Google the word you’ve just created…

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During my recent trip to Poland I noticed that English words, phrases and names have become a norm in everyday language. Don’t get me wrong, English borrowings have always been present in Polish.  What I’m talking about here is the presence of a huge number of foreign-sounding (mainly English) phrases or names, which often replace perfectly acceptable Polish equivalents.

In a way, it’s a variant of Ponglish, where native Polish speakers living in an English-speaking country swap certain Polish words or phrases for English ones, or add Polish pre- and suffixes, decline or otherwise modify English words to fit in with the rest of the (Polish) sentence.

I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon on Polish TV last week, where, during a morning cooking show, the cook said an ingredient “zrobi tę sałatę sharp” ["will make the salad sharp"] to which the presenter replied: “Będzie z powerem” [literally: "It'll have some power"]. If you ask me, both are examples of linguistic laziness, where the speaker cannot be bothered to look for – or indeed, doesn’t know – the Polish equivalent. Presumably, both speakers also thought they sounded cool. We should probably ask their target audience – pensioners and housewives – whether they also thought so.

It’s slightly different when you use an English phrase in an informal setting. Many people use “sorry” in Polish when speaking with friends, often in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way. Last week I also noticed when two girls said good-bye to each other in the street, one of them said “I love you” in English, presumably meaning “You are very important to me and I care about you as you’re my friend.” The Polish equivalent “kocham cię” wouldn’t work in such a context as it’s too emotionally charged and there’s no in-between Polish equivalent.

And that’s the thing. In many instances people will use an English word either because it offers this in-between meaning which doesn’t have its Polish equivalent, or because it cannot be directly translated – or the translation simply doesn’t work. The best example of the latter is the word “interface”. I remember when people tried to localise it by providing a rather literal translation, “międzymordzie”. Well, that didn’t work. “Interface” has since become “interfejs” and many other English words have been adopted (and adapted) in the same way.

But this “Polglishisation” of Polish is just one thing. Another very noticeable trend is making your business or brand sound foreign. Many businesses seem to believe that English (or foreign, in general) words and phrases make them sound more appealing, exotic or sophisticated. Again, this is not a new trend, but a day at a shopping centre often leaves Poles with a choice between (among others) a trip to Cinema City, or a shopping spree at Your New Style, House, Pretty One or Top Secret And Friends (!!). Your mobile can come from Play and you can play at Fantasy Park (no, it’s not what you think it is).

So is it just me or is English becoming very dominant in every Pole’s life? I realise that this post only scratches the surface of the phenomenon (or problem, depending on your point of view), but I would love to hear what you think about it.

Whether you are Polish and living in Poland or whether you are an English speaker (and also living in Poland), leave a comment and let me know:

Is there more English in Polish?
If so, does it bother you?
Got any examples?

I’ll ask my Facebook and Twitter followers (“followersi” in Polish) to chip in too.Tweet

Over a year ago I wrote about a project called Cafe Fogg, which revived an old Polish crooner’s music and ‘translated’ it for a modern audience. Projekt Warszawiak (Warszawiak, in Polish, is a person living in Warsaw)  is inspired by – and relies on – music produced by legendary Warsaw-based folk bands like Orkiestra z Chmielnej. This is how Łukasz Garlicki and Jacek Jędrasik, two artists behind Projekt Warszawiak, describe their venture:

WARSAW. A city with a broken spine, destroyed tradition and ugly, impolite character, deserves respect. There are few authentic trails of the past left, so it’s worth it to look for them and to share with others even more.
This project is a tribute to all the Warsaw street musicians, pre-war composers, and song writers who gave the music spirit to this city…
Legendary street tunes and lyrics were the inspiration to create the tracks described by digital effects, samples, electronic beat and live instruments.
Special thanks and regards to the Chmielna Street Orchestra – the real source of the party-and-music raptures!

I’m fascinated by the cheeky, in-your-face lyrics (“Your wife won’t find out her hubby drank all night to ladies’ health”) accompanied by dark, at times experimental-sounding electronic music. Not sure this will be everyone’s cup of tea, but I guess neither were the original tracks, although they sat at the opposite end of the musical spectrum.

Nevertheless, Projekt Warszawiak seems to be taking Poland by storm. This video has been viewed on YouTube over a million times already and it’s only been up for a couple of weeks.

I’ve seen this clip posted on Facebook more often than any other Polish video over the past few years. And it’s brilliantly done. You can almost smell Warsaw. The real, everyday Warsaw – where the old world, however ugly or fascinating it might be, clashes with its ambitious, pretentiously modern and at times depressing equivalent.

Here is “Nie ma cwaniaka nad Warszawiaka” (which losely translates as “No one is as crafty as a Warszawiak”). Pure gold.

For more tracks, see their MySpace page and visit their site here.Tweet

The first post in 2011 will be short, but hopefully interesting.

I’ve just come across a site for the BBC National Short Story Awards. It’s not a new site, but I thought I’d share a link to it as it also has a short story by a Polish writer, Adam Kaminski.

According to the site,

“Kaminski writes fiction, plays and literary criticism. He was born in 1978 and lives in Gdynia. His first collection of stories, Alone, was published in 2006 and his latest collection, The High Priestess, is currently in press.”

They’ve posted a link to a story called “The Girl from The Train”, translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who seems to specialise in Polish literature.

The story opens as a Word document. Enjoy.Tweet

To mark the beginning of its “A year in images” photo exhibition in Katowice, Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza has published this short time-lapse, tilt-shift video about Katowice.

I’ve mentioned the city many times on this blog, partly because I know it well, partly because it’s eventually, although very slowly, shedding its “dirty, industrial and boring” image.

Heavy industry has always been a crucial part of this city’s – and the region’s – history, but over the past 20 years Katowice and many neighbouring cities have had to reinvent themselves. The coal mines and steel factories might be gone, but they have been replaced by General Motors, Fiat and hundreds of others which helped the area reinvent itself.

Katowice itself is undergoing probably one of the most dramatic changes in its recent history. The lovely, partly neglected and partly confused city centre is being re-developed. Mariacka St, once a very dodgy, but architecurally lovely street, has been pedestrianised and the city’s biggest eyesore, the main railway station, is eventually (although not without controversy) going to be rebuilt and its sorrounding area transformed into a very modern transport and shopping hub.

All that is captured in the film. From Nikiszowiec, the old working class district of Katowice, where window frames and sills are still painted bright red, to Rynek, the curiously underused central square. From the recently modernised Rondo gyratory (with the famous flying saucer-shaped Spodek concert hall in the background), to the about-to-be-completely-rebuilt bus and train station in the heart of the city.

Those who know Katowice, will find many familiar sights here, those who don’t should probably give it a chance. After all, it’s been shortlisted as one of Poland’s candidates to become the European City of Culture in 2016.

Katowice. Rok w fotografii Gazety Wyborczej
Uploaded by gazeta_katowice. – Watch the latest news videos.
If you happen to be in Katowice over the next few weeks, make sure to visit the exhibition, which is open from 9.12.2010 to 14.01.2011 in the Cultural Centre in Katowice.
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You probably are if you live in Scotland. It’s called St Andrew’s Day. But in Poland it’s not so much about the saint, it’s more about predictions and parties.

Andrzejki, how the day is referred to (from Andrzej, which is the Polish equivalent of Andrew), is when everybody predicts their future by observing some fun customs like pouring hot wax on cold water or moving girls’ shoes from one end of the room to the door. Why wax and why the shoes, you ask? Let me explain.

Traditionally, single girls used the day to predict when they would get married or what they could expect in the coming months. With time, this tradition was adopted by men too and for decades now Andrzejki has simply been a good excuse for a party (even mid-week).

The most popular and the most traditional way of predicting the future on Andrzejki is by melting a lot of wax and then pouring it (ideally through an old-fashioned key) onto cold water. This needs to be done carefully so that the wax forms one solid ‘shape’. You then remove the ‘shape’ from the water (once the wax has solidified, that is) and – using a strong source of light – look at the shadow it throws on the wall.

And this is when you need to use your imagination. You need to ‘read’ the shadow. Is it a man? Is it a pig? Is it a baby? Is it a monster? Whatever it is, this is your future (apparently).

Another custom involves single girls only. They each need to take a shoe off and place it in a row, starting by the wall opposite the main door. Then the last shoe is brought to the front and then the next one and so on. The owner of the shoe which reaches the door first will definitely get married next year. Guaranteed. Or your money back.

Whatever the future holds, tonight is the night. Have a ball!

Image by bildungsr0man via Flickr, Creative Commons licenceTweet