[StainlessSteelCynic]

Some of this is covered in his first email so bear with me

Email two

Fruit seems to be mostly peaches, apples, pears, plums, cherries, strawberries and I think grapes as well. I've seen apple trees growing wild plus don't forget the mushrooms and wild berries which are a seasonal favourite.
They don't seem to have any 'greens' such as peas, green beans or broccoli. A lot of the meals are heavy in carbohydrates and there doesn't seem to have been a lot of vegetable imports until recently (packets of frozen veggies are the most common way to get anything like cauliflower, broccoli and peas and so on). Corn is available but it's known as maize. Most vegetables are boiled. They also make good use of noodles.

There are a number of dried meat products like salami, dry sausage etc. To be harsh, a lot of Polish cheeses are bland and they (and dried meats for that matter) taste so similar to each other you can be forgiven for thinking they are exactly the same. There might be plenty of them on display at the supermarket but I couldn't tell the difference between them by taste.

The Poles are not big on spicey foods and things like chilli are only just coming into their diets but only the really mild types. They have local "hot sauces" which are nothing more than pepper or paprika based and not very hot at all. The idea of chilli dishes like the Yanks have would scare the living daylights out of the Poles and you can bet it'll be a long time before a Brit can find a decent hot curry here!

They have a local variety of pizza which is nothing more than a thick bread-type base with sauce, cheese and some meat. You want anything else it's an extra and naturally costs extra but they do make them in a really big sizes - about half a metre across was the largest I saw!
When you're not used to it, the meat stew called 'bigos' goes through you within hours. It's typically made with pork, bacon, cabbage and sauerkraut. I needed to visit the toilet about three times in the one day after my first sample of it and still found it good for "creating some movement down south" even after having eaten it a few times - a real shame because it's really tasty!

The roadsigns are all pretty good, equal to anything in the West, but that's probably a direct result of their entry into the EU and the increase in both tourism from Germany and the number of cars now in private ownership. Pity most of the roads are utter crap! During the early 1990s the streetsigns would have been decent but there would have been a number of roads with no signs posted for them as they passed or lead to either Soviet or Polish military bases.

You still see a hell of a lot of people in the smaller towns and villages riding bicycles, a hang-over from the decades without private car ownership.
Although not directly confirmed, I get the impression that some villages didn't have signs simply because most people would have lived, married and died within their hometown. If you never travel farther than the next village you don't bother with street signs!
Even today most Poles marry their childhood or university sweetheart and stay in the town and while there is a movement of younger people to the larger towns, it's only been happening in a big way since the fall of communism.

In the larger towns and the cities it's different as they tend to have street signs for all the primary and secondary roads. However... some of the signs are on buildings and if you don't look everywhere you can easily miss them. If you're lucky the sign is on a building that's on a street corner. If you're unlucky then you have to examine individual buildings to find their street address. Often this is just a simple plaque about 6-10 cm long with the house number and street name.

The Soviet era apartment blocks are the worst, there might be eight of them with the same area address but they aren't necessarily next to each other. For example, the place that I'm in has 8 blocks but one of them is some distance away and the number sequence is screwed up. It kind of goes, Block 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 6, 8, 4 (block 4 being the furthest away). Don't ask why, even the locals don't know! Finding out what block is what requires you to go to the front door and read the 6cm wide plate above the door - even some of the postal workers get confused apparently - and there's no certainty the plate will be there!
Many of these apartment blocks were made of concrete and left in their natural concrete finish. I can imagine that it's incredibly depressing to be surrounded by walls and walls of grey concrete day after day. They're painting them now with vibrant colours but sometimes it's too much colour and is jarring to the eye.

Beer, locals will drink it warm from the shop shelf and they'll often buy just one can and drink it once they've reached home, then they'll go back and buy another single can the day after. The Polish for beer is "piwo" pronounced pi-vo. Brands include Okocim, Żywiec, Warka, Lech, Carlsberg, Kasztelan and Tyskie. Those last two were my favourites, specifically Kasztelan (the 'sz' is pronounced like our 'sh'.)

Email three

Cigarette brands I haven't paid much attention to being a non-smoker but there are a lot of import brands now. You can buy tobacco products almost anywhere and Poland grows a decent amount of tobacco and I believe most of it is for their own use. Brands include Caro, Fajrant, Jan III Sobieski, Iris, Mocne, Fox, Viva, Mars and Carmen but I couldn't tell you if any of those are modern brands although I suspect that most have been around for at least a few decades. The Poles enjoy smoking and just as many women in the towns and cities do it as the men although I didn't notice it much amongst women in the villages.

Many Polish men still believe that long hair is for women - if it's growing past your neck then you're obviously not a proper man. This is changing now with more Western European tourists and US & British movies coming into the country but it'll take a while.

You buy bus and tram tickets from little kiosks that sell magazines, cigarettes, some drinks and the like. They're scattered all over the place and are typically staffed by older women who give you the distinct impression that you are being a burden by buying something! You could buy a ticket from the bus/tram driver if you don't mind putting up with his indignant protests of how much of an imposition it all is. And nobody reads books/magazines while on the bus or tram.

Another thing, you never say thank you after you've bought something, doesn't matter what it is. You say thank you after the seller has given you any change you're owed. If you don't do it in this order, they assume you are giving them the change as a tip.

Polish cemeteries can be a bit weird at night. Many Poles will pay a regular visit to relatives graves on the weekends and leave flowers or votive candles on the graves. Sellers set up tables to flog off bunches of flowers, vases, candles, candle holders and religious statues. At night time, many of the candles are still burning and because there's not much in the way of streetlights around the graveyards in many towns, all you see is a collection of flickering lights in the distance. Particularly effective for spooking you in some places as the cemeteries are sometimes surrounded on two or three sides by light forest.

Interestingly, you can find certain old buildings in various towns (typically in the northern half of the country) that have discrete Masonic symbols in their facades. I never saw many of them and for all I know they may have been Masons Halls. I believe the Masons had some representation in Poland from before WW1.
Still plenty of castle ruins too, a good number of them having belonged to the Teutonic Order especially Malbork Castle (which is bloody huge and still in damned good condition - anyone controlling it in a T2k setting would control the river and they'd have to be bombed out of it).

I think I have some more info in some other emails but I'll have to trawl back through them - a job for another night.