The Polish foot fetish

Judging by the reactions of Polish people I’ve concluded that having bare feet must be one of the leading causes of death in Poland. If you want to provoke a horrified reaction in Poland don’t bother running around Krakow’s main square with your trousers off, just stand on some cold concrete in bare feet—women, children and grown men will weep and faint at the sight. It’s not just bare feet either. Inappropriate footwear has gotten me into more cross-cultural hot water than anything else. I have no idea where this strange Polish obsession with matters podiatal came from but it seems to be taking up more and more of my time. As they say: before you criticize, walk a day in the other man’s shoes—that way you’re a day’s walk away and you’ve got his shoes when he hears about it.

Just to prove that anything you can conceivably type into a Google image search will already have been thought of we present:

The ladies of Polish Feet Centre and their stomping great hoofers
bearing down on your puny masculinity. I’m not making this up.

Walking around in bare feet, even indoors in the middle of summer, may be just one of approximately 974 things that I’ve been told will almost certainly kill or severely injure me in Poland, but it’s pretty near the top of the list. Others include “dangerous breezes,” no breeze, night air, air after storms (getting the right kind of air moving at an acceptable speed is practically impossible), the tops of bananas, potato skins, too little salt, too much salt, tap water, and Russians. The two things that have actually come closest to killing me, vodka and cars, are either never mentioned or portrayed in a glowingly positive light.

The deadly risks of bare feet
I swear one of the questions they ask you at Polish passport control is “Did you bring slippers?” Answering in the negative can get you thrown out of the country as a dangerous lunatic or, if it’s one of those nice lady passport control people, can get you a free pair of Polish government slippers. These are issued to Polish commandos for tricky situations like minefields because, as every Pole knows, only a good slipper can save you from death. I’ve still got mine and often use them for crossing lava flows.

A mass cemetery for foreign slipperless victims of death just outside Poznan

Usually Polish people are too shocked or too unconscious to explain why walking around in bare feet is so deadly, but as far as I can gather it’s something to do with an evil force or coldness or something traveling up your leg and giving you piles or a bad back or arthritis. Followed by death. In a recent survey that I just recently made up the perils of bare feet came in the top ten of “Imminent dangers to the Polish state” well ahead of Islamic extremism and only just behind eating dinner after 2 pm.

Polish slippers: capable of withstanding nuclear-weapons aimed directly at your feet

The wrong shoes
When I first came to Poland I had two pairs of shoes. A pair of trainers/sneakers and a pair of Doctor Martins Slip-on boots. I loved those boots. They were probably the seventh or eighth pair of the same make I had owned. I could wear them year round, in any weather and they were waterproof and never too hot or too cold. Two-and-a-half years later I have winter shoes, autumn shoes, summer shoes, sandals, going-to-wedding shoes, visiting-priest shoes, walking shoes, “good” shoes and, of course, slippers. I never expected to own this number of shoes without first becoming gay. Polish social pressure is slowly turning me gay from the feet upwards.

The footwear of choice for the red-blooded heterosexual Englishman, before he moves to Poland

At first it was okay. But once I had met the same people more than a couple of times I began to overhear whispered conversations about my footwear:

Pole1: Aren’t those the same shoes he was wearing in late summer/early autumn?

Pole2: I think they are. I even saw him wearing them on the bus and at the theater.

Pole1: God’s wounds! What strange benighted creatures these Englishmen are!

Pole2: If you think that’s weird you should see his underpants.

Pole1: (faints)

I counted the number of shoe shops on my street today and there are almost as many of them as there are banks.

Must go now, I’ve got four hours of shoe polishing and two of foot cleansing and toenail care before I can turn in for the night. But first I’m going to really go to town with the tags for this post.

Topless women soften Polish court

In a move widely expected to hasten the end of civilization two women have been acquitted of indecent exposure after they were found sunbathing topless on a Polish beach in May 2008. On Wednesday a Szczecin court overturned the 130 zloty fines that it had firmly, but playfully, slapped on the two naughty lasses in November.

Dorota Krzysztofek and her pixelated friend presenting some formidable points to the court.
(Photo credit: bas/AFP/Getty Images)

Officer X, who made the arrest, told the court “Myself and Officer Y made careful long-distance observations of the accused over a period of several hours and can confirm that they quite clearly had their gazongas out.” When asked what had brought him to the beach that day the officer replied “Well, it was my turn with the binoculars.”

The two women who, for legal reasons, can only be referred to as ‘the blonde one’ and ‘the other one’ made tearful statements to the assembled media during an impromptu 3-hour photo session outside the court. “I’m just happy it’s all over” sobbed 28-year-old Dorota Krzysztofek (the Blonde One, ed.), “now I can get back to a normal life getting my hooters out in magazines.”

A spokesperson for Topfreedom, an international chestpuppy liberation movement, in Poland to lend her support to the women told journalists “This is a proud day for the women of Poland and their jumper dumplings. Now there is nothing to stop the womanhood of this nation swinging freely in the breeze.” Her words were greeted by hearty cheers from onlookers, followed by the sound of several dozen umbrellas repeatedly impacting skulls.

A Mrs. Mary Magdelana Woebetide, of the Campaign for Family Purity, slammed the court in a press release: “These two hussies should be ashamed of themselves. In a civilized country they would have been birched and paraded through the streets with their heads shaved. It’s time our so called politicians looked to God-fearing countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan for a lead.”

Szczecin is approximately 280 miles northwest of Warsaw and is served by regular train services in the summer. It has a population of 407,000, about 45,000 of whom are quite fit.

Myth #21: Polish girls are gorgeous

THERE’S MORE LIKE THIS ON OUR NEW SITE – POLANDIAN.COM

I realise I’m taking my life in my hands here but the truth must be told. Western men (heterosexual ones at least) visiting Poland for the first time tend to be blown away by Polish girls. Then they go home and tell all their friends that Poland is stuffed full of super-gorgeous babes and the myth spreads. I’ve looked into this issue very carefully (it was tough work but it had to be done) and I’ve come to the following conclusions. Polish women are not intrinsically any better looking than the women of any other nation but they do have several qualities that make them seem like they are:

1. They are much slimmer than western women. I put this down to the fact that they eat far less rubbish than westerners in general and drink less alcohol than western women.

2. They dress much better than most western women. This doesn’t mean they dress more expensively, in fact just the opposite. The average young Polish women has little money to spare for fancy clothes and is likely to spend what money she does have on fairly sober and practical items. This tends to make them look casually sophisticated and enticingly understated.

3. They are more conservative than western women. This means that they tend to be more demure and present themselves with what could be called ‘old fashioned’ femininity. This is, of course, probably very bad for Polish women themselves but it makes simple-minded western males go all weak at the knees… at least at first.

4. They have sexy accents. To the uneducated western ear a Polish accent is indistinguishable from a Russian accent. Western men grew up on a diet of James Bond movies in which the sexiest women were always Russian agents who wore nothing under their fur coats. Slavic accents are sexy. Its a reflex built into us from the age of fourteen.

Strangely, however, if you ask Polish men who the most attractive Polish women are they tend to go for bizarre hyper-Barbie figures with inflated chests and hideously exaggerated makeup. A strange character called Doda springs to mind. Weird.

Doda – completely indistinguishable from about a thousand other European and American hip chicks and completely the opposite of the average Polish woman

More myths about Poland