Thursday, August 10, 2006

The Poles are coming!

Each month, a thousand Polish workers take temporary positions in Belgium thanks to the recent simplification of European Union rules for recruiting workers from the new Central and Eastern member states. I'm obviously out of touch with the population working in agriculture, as all the Poles I know I've either encountered at Yale, Amersfoort, or Poland.

My visit to Poland has left me not only with a five-word Polish vocabulary, but also the ability to tell Poles apart from other Europeans--probably akin to being able to tell the Chinese and Japanese apart. And I can kind of distinguish their language from other Slavic tongues...with a 51% success rate.

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