Poles You Should Know

Poles You Should Know has been a regular feature of our Polish print guides for some time, with background articles on a number of famous (and some infamous) Poles proving to be very popular with our readership.

Now, for the first time, many of these pen portraits have gone on line. Find the first of them here.

From the Baltic to the Atlantic... With no passport

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus all become members of the Schengen Protocol at mignight tonight. Border controls will disappear, meaning that a traveller could make his or her way (by land - airport controls remain in place until March 31, 2008) from Estonia to Portugal without showing a passport.

What our users are saying...

Since the beginning of the year, we have enabled all visitors to our website, www.inyourpocket.com, to comment on the places they visit. This week has seen a particularly bumper crop of comments come in, and not all that many of them are complimentary. The most damning is this, sent in by Steve B. of Warsaw, commenting on the Dom Restaurant Gessler in Warsaw:

"Absolutely terrible in every possible way..." (Click for the full review)

Funniest Line of the Year?

Each year at the annual In Your Pocket get together, held in some swank location just before Christmas, the funniest review of the year wins its author a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

If you want to nominate a review this year get in touch at editorial_enquiry (at) inyourpocket.com.

As things stand the funniest thing I have read so far this year in an IYP guide is not in a review per se, but in the excellent Solidarity feature in the latest issue of Gdansk IYP.

There is just something about the phrase 'the dangerously named Derek aftershave' that had me in a fit of giggles for several minutes, my wife and children looking on rather concerned.

Save Our Shipyards!

According to the EU Observer, bureaucrats in Brussels threaten the continued existence of Gdansk's symbolic shipyards, birthplace of Solidarity and of Polish democracy. The EU is about as popular as imported Vodka in Poland right now: this latest row will only fuel anti-EU feeling.

The fight against closure is being led by none other than Lech Walesa, the former leader of the Solidarity movement, and first president of post-Communist Poland.

Poles apart

To me, this is an amazing story. It's about a Polish woman who came home from holidays to find the local council had built a road in her back yard. When she complained, she was told that the council can build roads on private land without the consent of the owner, and without having to pay compensation to the owner.

That left me kinda gobsmacked. At the same time it just rang so true with my own experiences of the baffling municipal mentality that you can bump into while living in Eastern Europe.

To be fair, I found the story on Ananova - a website geared more towards offering amusement than offering informatioin or, erm... all the facts. There must be more to the story. I really hope so.

Anyway, read it for yourself on the Ananova website:
Garden turned into road during holiday

Poles revive eight-year-old gay Teletubby probe

As reported on just about every news site, Poland is investigating whether Teletubbies, especially that one that minces about with the handbag, might be gay. So, that means it's only taken Poland eight years to cotton on to the Tinky-Winky women's accessory subversive make-the-kiddies-gay story. It's old news.

Beer Today, England Tomorrow

The BBC reports on how Polish beers Tyskie and Lech are taking England by storm, and how Romania's Ursus could follow...

Be afraid, be very afraid...

Bottled beers take Pole position

Shock: Poland and Ukraine get Euro 2012

UEFA have just announced that the 2012 European Championships (that's a football tournament, folks) will be held in Poland and Ukraine. Host cities will be Gdansk, Katowice, Poznan, Warsaw and Wroclaw in Poland, and Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kiev and Lvov in Ukraine. Five of those cities are In Your Pocket already: expect the others to be so by kick-off.

Poles plan to ban men in skirts

Polish authorities are keen to ban men in skirts, reports The Scotsman. It seems some Scots, possibly after raising their glasses a few too many times, have been raising their kilts and exposing their bums and wedding apparatus to astonished locals.

Of course, we're all familair with complaints and concerns about drunken British yobbos and beer monsters descending on Eastern Europe and wreaking all manner of disrespectful havoc, but now the men in skirts have come under specific criticism in Poland for their garment lifting tomfoolery.

Wroclaw wants to ban kilts alltogether, after local police have admitted that they just can't control "groups of maurauding Scots". The police, however, are unsure that thay can enforce a kilt ban.

The article in The Scotsman goes on to quote a young local from Krakow who said that: "You can't go round the corner without seeing a Scot showing off what he has under his kilt while one of his mates photographs him."

Photo from Looking Glass (clearly a classy individual) on Flickr.