A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland

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Certainly, with my first journey to Polandand getting used to a wholly new culture, I sought to find myself – to have my character reset. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. When, at the end of March 2017, it became clear that the UK was leaving the EU, Ben thought it is time for him to leave Poland, and in April he did so. This, along with more extreme examples (bringing beer into a nunnery, trespassing into conferences, and using his friend's favourite things as ashtrays), paints the author in a bad light no matter how fondly you look upon him. I wasn't surprised to see the mixed opinions; I myself found some of the book's content questionable and expected there might be others who agreed with me.

Indeed, Katowice is not a tourist magnet, not really a place to rival magic Kraków just down the A4 motorway.RADIOWARNING: CONTAINS AN UNLIKELY IMMIGRANT, AN UNSUNG COUNTRY, A BUMPY ROMANCE, SEVERAL SHATTERED PRECONCEPTIONS, TRACES OF INSIGHT, A DOZEN NUNS AND A REFERENDUM.

When he wasn’t peeling potatoes he was on the road scratching the country’s surface: he milked cows with a Eurosceptic farmer; missed the bus to Auschwitz; spent Christmas with complete strangers and went to Gdansk to learn how communism got the chop. When it comes to meeting Jędrzej, a friend of Aitken’s employers at the language school he agreed to work for, we once again see the author’s humorous take on the Polish language shine through: “What a queer set of letters. In fact, several of the promised elements of the book come in the last quarter, with little of the earlier content featuring on the advertisement. A sincere, mischievious and hilariously funny journal of strange and absolutely normal encounters that made me wish to visit Poland, even though I'm Polish. However, and I say this knowing humour is subjective, the contents of this book do not seem like they were designed to be funny.I have read many reviews which complain about the author and his personality, whilst others seem to not mind. Many Poles do speak English, but some of the English dialogues between Ben and Polea strike me as being too sophisticated to be either uttered or understood by the Poles. Aitken took his curiosity as the EU referendum approached to go and investigate Poland and why Polish people come to the UK, and to do so by living there for a year and doing minimum wage jobs. When Poles ask the question, do they assume that Poland is such a dirt-poor country with zero opportunities? Ben Aitken is definitely great at chopping potatoes but he's even better at slicing apart and serving a surprising mixture of stories from the country at the "heart of Europe".