I made a slightly longer weekend visit to Poland to see some friends of mine. I have now since the last four years been going to Poland almost every year and it feels as if I have been seeing a country that is changing in front of my eyes.
The infrastructure is significantly improving via the aid of EU and by their own means. This must be pushed even stronger though! The quality of the cars that are driving on the streets are very high. They have new modern cars. Their shopping malls are completely full with people that are there to eat from all the American food chains as well as go shopping in the stores that are from Germany, France, Spain and Sweden. It is strange to see how the French chain stores skipped over Germany and established themselves in Poland instead. I would today not be able to pick a Poland person on the street if I would see them walking. They have been completely westernized and are wearing exactly the same cloths and are buying exactly the same products. If I go back even four years in time at least in my opinion they were wearing cloths that were more eastern European which was more bling, bling with shiny little glass, plastic pieces everywhere.
Poland is a very interesting country. They have a difficult past with wars and communism. Area-wise they are almost as big as Germany and they have half the population with almost 40 millions. The current unemployment is around 12%. My feeling was that the unemployment rate is very much located to the country side because the cities are bustling with life and even more so then what I see in Germany.
I talked in a previous post about Poland and their negative trade balance and now I start to think that it is only based on that they have such a demand for consumption and that it is today easy for them to get money/credit. The salaries are around 4000 zloty which becomes something similar to 1000 €. Some parts of living is cheaper and some are very expensive. As an example they pay more for the gas (energy) then what I do in Germany and for this reason they are very interested in pushing shale gas extraction.
My friend that live and work there was strangely enough negative about the future which I neither understand or see any reason for. He has an excellent job and are making good money. Is living in a big apartment that he owns without any debts. Maybe it is just the polish way to complain even when there is nothing really to complain about.
It was a great weekend though and a nice country to visit as a tourist.
2 comments:
POLAND & POLISH PEOPLE
Just to make everybody aware:
1) Yes, Polish poeple complains a lot. We love to be always sceptical and to see our situation more gray than it is in real.
2) Just now Polish trade balance become possitive. It did not happen since long time. I do not even know if it ever was possitive..
Anyway - Poland is changing, but there is still a lot to do, but I hope Polan will manage to join EU A class.
I am very happy to hear that the Polish trade balance has started to become positive! The data I used was statistics from the EU database and it was probably more then two years old.
Yes, it would be good if Poland could join the EU A class (and it will pretty soon I am sure!) but personally I would prefer that there would not be such a classification at all.
Thanks for your comment!
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