A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland

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Moreover, I still don't feel like I got an idea of what Polish culture is except setting a place out for a stranger, ranging hospitality and 'weird' food (as an Asian, I personally think that we need to get over our meager limit on what 'food' should look like and just embrace others culture instead of bitching or making fun of how people made the most out of everything, but I digress). It showed me Poland from a completely different angle, one which I hope to experience for myself one day. Adeptly balances personal ruminations on love, attraction, and friendship, with cultural evaluations that subvert British stereotypes of Polish citizens [. In terms of acquisition, every language presents its own unique challenges, and Polish is no different. One of the main problems I usually have with travel books is that they are commonly written by white males who can afford to put themselves in hilarious (unsafe) situations.

The most uncomfortable aspect of this however, comes from the fact that the author admits to not taking part in the referendum.Interestingly, opinion was split between those who like the EU for its money and those who thought the EU is just Germany.

Even though I fully agree with him on these points a book like this is not the platform to share your political views and other convictions (do not feed bread to the ducks people, do not! It's perfectly fine for a memoir to not be funny and, for what it's worth, there were even a few funny moments. Adeptly balances personal ruminations on love, attraction, and friendship, with cultural evaluations that subvert British stereotypes of Polish citizens […] An engaging romp through Polish culture, with a resonant political message of the importance of interacting with other cultures and preserving our ties with Europe.

This book is very much like the stereotypes of the English abroad and I did cringe quite a bit reading it. By the year's end he had a better sense of what the Poles had turned their backs on - southern mountains, northern beaches, dumplings! There are many footnotes, some explaining historical references, others amusing extensions of the main text. His task was to peel an interminable number of potatoes, then to chip them with a gadget, then to do the complicated work of de-boning kilos of cod. When he wrote about his plans to make bigos , commonly known as “hunter’s stew”, I almost felt jealous.

WARNING: CONTAINS AN UNLIKELY IMMIGRANT, AN UNSUNG COUNTRY, A BUMPY ROMANCE, SEVERAL SHATTERED PRECONCEPTIONS, TRACES OF INSIGHT, A DOZEN NUNS AND A REFERENDUM.I couldn't help but cringe every moment the romance interest was mentioned by the author (a lot); and I can only hope the author got permission from the romance interest to publish her name and their interactions. We should know more than we do about Poland, a nation with which we have had centuries of interaction.