RT Afonso Matos 🇵🇹
For the past 3 weeks, I've been travelling around Poland. I started in Krakow, then went to Wroclaw, and now I'm in Warsaw.
I'm completely amazed by how clean, organised and polished all these cities feel. You don't see crazy people on the streets, people behaving strangely like you do in Spain or Italy, for example, or trash on the ground. I cannot emphasise enough how clean everything looks. It's like being in Singapore or Japan.
Travelling between cities is also a very pleasant experience. The trains are very comfortable (and again, clean), and they have restaurants on board that actually serve amazing, affordable Polish food!
In Warsaw particularly, everybody is very well dressed, and walking around the city centre feels like such an elevated experience. It's crazy that Poland's GDP per capita has more than tripled in dollar terms over the past 20 years. I think people back home still see Poland as a very poor country, but that view is completely outdated now. In Krakow, I also met Italian girls who said they felt so safe walking around. I mentioned I was going to visit Bologna soon, and they joked that I'd only see Pakistani people.
Poland has had a huge influx of Ukrainian immigration, and you notice it in Ubers, cafés, bars, etc. But because the culture and religion are similar, it doesn't feel like a big cultural contrast.
Well, coming from Portugal, I find people here slightly blunter and ruder, but again, all of this is relative (Brazilians think we're rude, for example), so I suppose you just get used to it.
The public transport works flawlessly, and the trains and buses are impeccably clean. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems Polish people have a stronger sense of civic responsibility when it comes to cleanliness than southern Europeans?
Judging by the cities I've visited so far, this does feel like what you'd imagine when somebody says “Europe”. It's super refreshing to be here. I think locals probably take it for granted by now.
