Word comes my way of a book by the name of There’s an Egg in my Soup by one Tom Galvin describing his experiences as an Irishman in Poland. It sounds awful but that may well be the fault of the publicity machinery behind the book. Here’s the cliché ridden summary on the publisher’s website:

Queues for groceries, unfathomable bus timetables, inexplicable traditions and truly bizarre soup – this is Poland in the mid-1990s, where Tom Galvin innocently went as a trainee teacher… Tom spent five years dealing with long and freezing winters, lack of good food, loneliness and hardship, as he discovered the misery as well as the joy of Polish life. He returned in 2007, to find surprising changes to the country that had been his home for the first years of his working life.

Queues, bad food and hardship – ah yes, brings back memories. To be sure – of the eighties, not the nineties, but perhaps his publishers have picked up the Polish authors’ fascination for accurate detail: how else could Mr. Galvin have spent five years here in the mid 90s and only return in 2007? I might add here that Polish bus timetables, despite recent slips in standards, are models of clarity and accuracy especially compared to the miserable specimens on display (sometimes) in roaring, modern Ireland.

Galvin is also ill-served by Bridget Hourican’s lazy, preening (“my own Grand Tour was spent in St Petersburg and Budapest”) review in the Irish Times. She spills the out-of-date clichés too:
“Your bathroom’s full of cockroaches? I have to share a communal loo.”
“bread queues and unravelling Orwellian bureaucracies out east”
“For five years he lived in an apartment with no TV” (the horror! The horror! Next we’ll be hearing that he had no car!)

Which brings me to my point: Poland is a thriving, thrusting, dynamic, modern state. Socially, culturally and aesthetically, it could not be further away from the stereotypes peddled in the west. As this clip from a popular TV show will demonstrate: