Re: re: how do Poles treat foreigners

The question was about Poles, not Poland, and I'm not denying that
Krakow is well worth spending a day or two in, and I'm not blaming
the locals for being miserable and pretentious. It's a tourist trap,
so they're sick of tourists, and historically it's the cultural
capital of Poland, so there's always the temptation to be arrogant
and boring. It's a nice place to go for a stroll once or twice a
year with friends. It says a lot that they keep writing to their
local paper complaining that foreign devils pee in the street, but
rarely moan about having to finance cops who don't stop foreign
devils peeing in the street.
Warsaw has all the disadvantages of a major European capital and all
the disadvantages of your average provincial Polish town, but none
of the advantages of either and all the complexes of both. Londoners
and Parisians don't have to ask if you've been there, folk from
Edinburgh or Copenhagen pretend to be pleasantly surprised if you
know their home town, but in Warsaw they get offended if you haven't
memorised how many times their grandparents were victims of This
and/or That.
The only good thing about living in the countryside is that you've
got stuff that civilised folk haven't got - mountains, fjords,
tigers, slightly bigger castles, a better choice of priests to be
molested by, amazing cheese, whatever. In practice, the Polish
countryside is mud and chickens. Flat boring landscapes, no
bookshops, ugly pensioners who think anyone that's not related to
them is a Jew.
Since you ask, I'm from Greenock (a provincial shitehole on the edge
of the known universe) and Glasgow (a normal city where your average
Warsaw or Krakow punter can't last 2 weeks without writing a blog
about how scary the real world is).