So then I started to wonder what the paranoia is about ticks as I have never heard about them being a problem in the UK.  Well apparently the problem is due to Tick-borne Encephalitis which is a nasty viral illness that affects the central nervous system and has a fatality rate of 1 – 5%.  It’s not found in the UK or in western europe so much – it’s more commonly found in the forested areas of Russia and central europe.  See the map below taken from kleszczeinfo.pl for coverage.

The general advice (taken from klesczeinfo.pl) is to be careful when walking in forested areas, fields or parks and to check your body regularly to make sure there aren’t any tick bites.  Children should be checked 2 or 3 times a day.  Check your clothes when you get home and have a shower to remove any larvae that are hard to see but might have stuck to you.  Particularly pay attention to soft areas such as behind the knees, behind the ears etc.

If you discover a tick then it should be removed from as close to the skin as possible as soon as possible using a fine pair of tweezers.  Don’t try and kill it using oils or creams or burn it with matches or cigarrettes as the virus is in the tick’s saliva and doing any of these things might increase the amount of infective material transmitted into the victim’s body.

For the paranoid there are vaccinations available (and no surprise it’s a vaccine manufacturer sponsoring the kleszczeinfo.pl website and running the ad campaign on TV about it).

Oh, and apparently they don’t fall from trees (will look forward to setting my mother-in-law right about that one) as they live in grass/bushes no higher than 20 to 70 centimetres where they find it easiest to latch on to passing prey.

In this post I ramble about my first visit to Poland on my motorbike, how I met my wife, our decision to move to Poland and why I never got around to visiting the Greenwich Millenium Dome.

P.S. Chris Tarrant – if you were listening drop me an email and I’ll see what I can do.

We spoke about how Chris met his wife, why he came to Poland, how he found a job, being a Dad, where to get a good curry, and what Chris thinks is wrong with Polish trees.  Listen to the podcast below to find out why Chris thinks the best place to learn Polish is in Egypt.

You can also check out Chris’s own blog here: Chris Thorborrow’s blog

I haven’t been hiding,  I have just been very very busy with work.  With two small kiddies at home I haven’t had much time to get on the computer in the evening either.

In 2010 I am pleased to announce that I am expanding my little web development company by taking on more employees and moving office.  Hopefully this means I will have extra capacity, won’t have to do so much ‘real work’ and can spend more time blogging :-)

P.S. Thinking rationally about this – if anybody wants a quote for a decent website or some web development work get in touch – I just realised that blogging is fun but I  still have to pay the bills :-(

1. Poland has a certain “quaintness” about it - there are lots of traditions and customs that have disappeared in the UK that are still evident in Poland, such as not working on Sunday.  In fact on Sunday my wife doesn’t even allow me to wash the car – not that I wash the car very often anway… :-)  If you happen to be out and about on a Sunday morning anywhere in Poland you will see people dressed up in their Sunday best heading off to church.  I am told that this used to happen in Britain back in the 50s….

2. Polish TV – Another thing I find both quaint and at the same time a little bizarre is the way that Polish TV just “stops” during the summer – it seems that all the TV serials just stop during July/August and they only screen repeats.  By late September new editions of everybody’s favourite programmes come on air.  Why don’t they just film a load of episodes in one go and spread them out throughout the year like in other countries? I can’t work it out.  Maybe it’s because during July/August nobody watches TV anyway because they’ve all gone on Holiday to the Baltic coast…

3. There is a cautious optimism in Poland – Whenever Brits ask me what I am doing now and I tell them I quit the UK and moved to Poland, the general reaction is along the lines of  “I envy you / good on you / this country is going down hill”.  In Poland Poles complain a lot about their country, but there is an underlying optimism that things are getting better and will continue to get better.  Everywhere there is evidence of improvement in the roads, pavements, renovation of public buildings, EU funded projects, EU development ads on TV etc.. In 2013 the postal market will be privatised and other markets such as the energy sector, ship building and so on are all going through the process or heading in that direction.

4. Family values are strong here – most Poles wouldn’t consider sticking Granny in an old people’s home.  Multiple generations living under one roof is quite common.  Although the divorce rate is rising it isn’t as endemic as that of the UK.

5. My local council doesn’t dictate to me about what days I have to leave the bins out, that they have to be on my property but right next to the pavement, that the lid has to be properly closed, that I have to segregate paper glass and plastic.  They don’t then charge me over a grand a year for it.  In fact there is no rubbish collection service whatsoever from my local council and in return I pay zero council tax.  Fantastic.  If I want somebody to take my rubbish away I can use a private company or do it myself.

One of the unavoidable problems that affects everybody moving to Poland at some point is changing money back and forth into Polish zloty (PLN).

If you are living in Poland and earning in PLN then it’s not so bad – you probably only need to change small amounts of currency when travelling.

If however (like me) you live in Poland but earn British pounds (GBP) then you have the continual headache of changing part of this income into PLN and constantly watching the exchange rates.

Also, if you are setting up a home in Poland you may well need to move a large sum as a one-off transaction to purchase a house.

It’s in exactly these scenarios that a currency broker comes in handy.

The advantages of using a currency broker:

• Your broker watches the markets for you.  A good broker will call you when the market moves in your favour in case you have funds to move.
• Your broker will have better rates than your local bank because they are currency specialists.

How do I find a broker that I can trust with my life savings?

Good question.  I had the same problem when I bought my house a couple of years back.  I didn’t have anyone in a similar situation that I could ask for a recommendation so I looked up a couple of the bigger names on Google and asked on some internet forums.  I got a couple of different quote and in the end decided to use Currency Solutions.  Martin Fox is my personal broker there and the Polish Zloty specalist.

I have been very happy with Martin to date which is why I still use him to convert my GBP salary into PLN every couple of months.  I am therefore happy to recommend Martin on my blog.  Currency Solutions offers:

• Optimum exchange rates giving substantial savings over equivalent bank transactions
• Fast priority transfers
• No commission fees
• In-depth market analysis and forecast recommendations
• One personal broker – one point of contact

To get in contact with Martin call him on +44 20 7740 0000 or see the Currency Solutions website.

Please mention BritishInPoland.com to Martin when contacting him.

To be honest the fact that Polish bars are incredibly smokey doesn’t affect me too much nowadays because quite simply I frequent them very rarely.

Regarding eating establishments I have noticed that a lot of restaurants have got their own ‘no smoking’ rules in place anyway, particularly those that have been refurbished or used for weddings, so at least I can eat a meal without having the disgusting smell of somebody’s cigarettes forced upon me.

Smoking Ban in Poland

But as a forward moving EU country it was just a matter of time before Poland decided to ban smoking like much of Europe has done or is in the process of doing.  I am pleased to see that this is now gathering pace.  This week there has been a lot of talk in the news about a new act of parliament (link here) that has been put forward to ban smoking in work places, pubs and restaurants. I just wonder how long it will take to become law and how strictly it will be enforced.

Passive Smoking

Another related news item is Poland’s first legal case regarding damages for passive smoking.  72 year old Hanna Niewiadomska from Gdańsk is suing her former employer Skanska S.A for damages because she has lung cancer (link here).  Personally I am surprised that it has taken until 2009 for such a case to appear. I hope she wins and this causes Polish employers to realise that in this day and age smoking has no place in the workplace.

He was 19 which is very old in doggy years apparently.  I suspect he was hanging on deliberately just to keep crapping all over the garden and generally annoying me.

Anyway, this left me with the problem of what to do with a dead dog.  Having duly informed my wife of the situation she was quite upset and therefore said I had to ‘deal with it’ before she got back.  That gave me two days time.

Now I have never had to deal with a dead dog before so I wasn’t too sure what to do.  I mean, what do you do with a dead dog?  My first thought was to go to a vet because back home in London I would have expected a vet either to take the body or know of someone or somewhere that would.  So the next day I went to town and found a vet.  Quite surprisingly the vet said he didn’t have facilities to deal with the dog and couldn’t further advise me.  When I asked him what Polish people normally do with dead animals he gave me that classic Polish look that says “we both know that what people do and what I am allowed to tell you to do are not the same thing” before repeating that he couldn’t further advise me.

Bugger.

So then I decided to drive around town and look for a second vet.  Luckily I found one that was open.  He told me that he also couldn’t help, but had no qualms in telling me that most people just bury their dead pets in the garden.  The idea of that much hard work didn’t appeal to me so my next question was  “how deep?”, imagining myself in the snow with a shovel for the next 4 hours. “About half a metre should do it” was the reply.

Back home I decided to have a quick look on google.pl to see if there was another solution.  I searched for anything I could think of that might help – “zwłoki zwierząt”, “martwy pies”, “krematorium psa” all turned up blanks.  The only thing I found out was that it is against the rules to bury dead dogs in the garden.  Hmmm, that means I had better wait till dark so the neighbours don’t see.  So later on I went outside in the cold and snow and started work with my shovel.  The temperature was -5 degrees and the ground was totally frozen.  I managed a pathetic 5 centimetres before deciding that to continue was just stupid.  I went back in to the house and back on the Internet to look for some sort of inspiration – I now had less than one day before my wife returned and still had a dead (and now totally frozen) dog to deal with.

With google letting me down (or possibly my lack of Polish vocabulary concerning dead animals) I decided a change in strategy was necessary.  I went to the Polish yellow pages at www.pkt.pl and decided to ring every vet in małopolskie until I found one that could help me.  I figured that a 2 hour round-trip by car to Kraków would be better than 6 hours in the snow with a shovel.

On only my second phone call I struck gold.  The kindly and elderly voice on the phone said that there was a company in Osiek near Oświęcim that collected dead pets.  He said he had their phone number on an invoice somewhere.  After a couple of minutes on hold he found their head office number in Warsaw.  I rang them up with excitement.  They gave me the Osiek number.  I rang them up with even more excitement hoping that an end to my problem was drawing near.  What a joy to my ears to hear that yes, they disposed of dead dogs, and that even better – they would come and collect it.  I asked how much this was going to cost me.  Free! Yes, apparently they have an agreement with the local council and this is a free service to residents.  A couple of hours later a huge truck turned up and they relieved me of my frozen four-legged burden.

This got me thinking later – if this is a free and clearly very useful service, how comes nobody seems to know about it?  Surely somebody at the council would have the brainwave to send a notice to all vets in the area that it exists?

Then the cynical part of my brain (that has been living in Poland for too long) came up with the answer.  It’s probably because the council pays for it that nobody knows about it.  Still, I am not going to complain about that.  That’s the reason why in the UK I paid £1,100 a year in council tax and in Poland I pay precisely £0.

Just in case you are reading this with a dead dog outside and your spouse hours away from return, I was going to put the details of the company here, but for the life of me I can’t find them.  They didn’t leave me any paperwork and I didn’t keep their phone number.  I suggest you ring your local gmina to see if they run this service, or start ringing all the vets within a 50 mile radius.  Good luck….

Andy currently works for the website Krakow Informer.

Listen to the interview by clicking on the player:

As always please feel free to leave comments and feedback below.

If you are interested in doing an interview with me then please feel free to contact me at ben@britishinpoland.com

Today I spoke to Shaun about his move to Poland.  Shaun is 33 and originally from Dublin, Ireland and now lives in Nowa Hutta near Kraków in Poland.  Shaun has been living in Poland for 2 years and talks about teaching English and life here.

Shaun has his own personal blog at www.konina.blogspot.com

Listen to the interview by clicking on the player below:

If you are interested in doing an interview with me then please feel free to contact me at ben @ british in poland . com [remove the spaces]