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Just love to smack fish with my śledźhammer
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Apr 2, 2024 20:04
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Mokotow posted:Wait until you meet people who don’t eat sushi because it’s raw fish. refuses to eat sushi, can't stand onions, thinks garlic is "spicy"? TIL my mom is actually polish
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Apr 2, 2024 20:22
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No, onions are inherently Polish… like, we call ourselves “cebulaki” - onion people. Your mom’s not Polish hth
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Apr 2, 2024 20:24
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Again, entirely psychological. I do know someone from the Middle East who complained about a dish being too spicy when at a restaurant. The offending ingredients? Garlic and onions. He told me his neck of the woods doesn't do spicy. At all. That there's actually a saying (in Arabic) over there about holding off on the garlic and onions as a generic phrase to say you don't want spicy food. Originating from those being the only spice you would ever expect and with many people finding them too hot.
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Apr 2, 2024 20:30
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People can also have different taste experiences due to physiological reasons. When I was sick with pneumonia, I couldn't enjoy anything with onion or strawberry in it for a while - they tasted vile and inedible. Thankfully it normalized very quickly after the illness was over and my lungs recovered. Makes me wonder how e.g. someone who has smoked for their entire life tastes things. I know that coriander tastes like soap to some people, which sounds great, soap is a cheap ingredient for making Indian cuisines.
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Apr 2, 2024 20:43
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Mokotow posted:No, onions are inherently Polish… like, we call ourselves “cebulaki” - onion people. Cebula is Latin though, I always imagined the Italian queen brought them along with her, making it a relatively recent thing.
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Apr 3, 2024 00:03
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Cebula is good, but chrzan and czosnek are great.
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Apr 3, 2024 04:26
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Osmosisch posted:Cebula is Latin though, I always imagined the Italian queen brought them along with her, making it a relatively recent thing. There are apparently very late 15th century usages in Old Ukrainian, that likely got it from Polish, so not that recent (I dunno how recent is relatively recent for you) Цибуля is also... very Slavic-feeling phonetically.
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Apr 3, 2024 05:23
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Interesting its "sibul" here and we use that to refer to russians near border lake as that is the area that has the best onions.
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Apr 3, 2024 05:58
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Szarrukin posted:Cebula is good, but chrzan and czosnek are great. Speaking of sushi and chrzan... I've known a few people who love wasabi but 'try' chrzan and dislike it. Granted it's dyed green at sushi places and that does make a difference to how you experience taste. Mokotow posted:In the early 00’s I had university friends who’d go to a sushi place, grab the raw tuna and get the other people heaving by shoving it in their faces. wtf was wrong with them? Sushi is mad expensive even now. I can only imagine what it was like with just a few restaurants in the whole city. (When the first dedicated male-only barbershops that used straight razors popped up in Warsaw the prices were ridiculous. Something like 180 zł for a basic cut and wet shave. That was like 15-20 years ago and more expensive than it is now.)
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Apr 3, 2024 08:15
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So I was telling another doctor that I like German cars but I probably wouldn't want to get one because every single major brand was complicit in WWII. He laughed it off and told me if I stayed away from companies that used or use slaves or are complicit in war crimes I'll be naked and voluntarily homeless. Specifically, he pointed out that there are major European banks operating in Poland which give preferred rates to soldiers in the Russian military, even if they don't give this same special treatment to their own soldiers. One of them even gives even better rates specifically to those soldiers who took part in the invasion and have proof of this. And the bank refused to end the practice even after being named & shamed for it. I looked this up and... he is correct, unfortunately e: gently caress Raiffeisen
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Apr 3, 2024 20:07
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What bank was it? E:Oh Raiffeisen
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Apr 3, 2024 20:20
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Bright Bart posted:Again, entirely psychological. the spiciness of arab food is largely dependent on how close to Aleppo it is. Stuff I get in Antakya like cheeses or sauce is inevitably the color of cheeto dust and melts your intestines. Lots of dried chili varieties on offer too. Go to Baghdad and lots of people will think cacik is 'spicy'.
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Apr 4, 2024 08:22
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Raiffeisen basically doesn't exist in Poland anymore. They always felt UBS/HSBC/RBS levels sleazy anyway. They had a really nice office on Jerozolimskie though, always copped a free coffee when I've visited. No ethical consumption under capitalism, but you can always take a look at what's happening presently and boycott companies like BMW, which is 25,8% owned by actual Nazi dynasty.
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Apr 4, 2024 08:35
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I was driving around Belgrade yesterday and was surprised by the number of nationalist murals and Косово је Србија graffiti in around the main plazas - turns out it’s the 25th anniversary of the NATO bombings. Seems like everyone is talking about Ukraine all the time. Belgrade is like a 1992 Warsaw stuck in time with a sprinkling of Russia and some absolutely unique Yugoslav bauhaus mutatnt architecture. Everybody is so angry and in a hurry, road shoulders are extra lanes for people in expensive cars. The hotel owner sits by the reception desk in the morning and counts his money, stacking bills in columns on his table. It’s wild. Also, it’s hard not to do this annoying thing when you eat here and go “hmm no regulations does mean the food is tastier”. While it’s clear it’s easiest for us Poles to understand Slovaks, I gotta say Serbian sounds like Polish the most of all the slav languages. Just the same noises and intonation. Vojvodina is one of the weirdest autonomous regions I’ve seen in Europe - it’s massive and empty. Hard to imagine it has such a strong autonomous streak, but it does lie on the crossroads. Going to Kosovo today! Mokotow fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 08:50
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Yeah the mural problem is well known. They're techically graffiti but investigative reporters from the EU/UK found that the government at various levels was condoning and even protecting them by for instance threatening to cut funding to municipalities and districts which pointed over things like tributes to Wagner or Death to Kosovo. Which, speaking of, they also found linki between the government in Belgrad and paramilitaries active in Kosovo. How we can possibly accept a country as an EU candidate when they're working to violently undermine a potential other one is beyond me. That should be like the very, very first criteria. Sorry for ruining your travelogue. (I sometimes actually wonder if my distate for that country, one of only three that I'm upset to share a Slavic language with, comes from my childhood when rich Serbs bullied the few Polish-Canadian kids. They were the only kids who bullied me at least. It was a nice school and I was technically part of one of the two popular kids' groups. One particular memory that sits with me was one asking 'Hey *bleep*, is there any electricity in that shithole Poland? Or is that why you guys leave and then take everyone's jobs?' and I was thinking to myself Didn't you just cry in class the other day because your uncle was among those killed in ethnic violence in his village? I'm not a monster so of course I didn't say anything. Then I read the news from any source and whelp nope it's just a wild place.) Bright Bart fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 09:18
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alex314 posted:No ethical consumption under capitalism, but you can always take a look at what's happening presently and boycott companies like BMW, which is 25,8% owned by actual Nazi dynasty. It's ~50% according to Wikipedia. Split between the family members. I would be real curious to learn how they acquired so much. Did they get rich and then buy back the company at a later point like has happened with a few of the firms complicit in war crimes/genocide? Did the Allies bring him back in to help run the company after the war? He was let off the hook for slaver labour during the war even though he refused to incriminate or testify against anyone else. I'm all for No Snitching in some limited cases, but when you're a Nazi war criminal you pretty much have to spill about yourself and even your family and accept your and their deaths if need be because not doing so is just another nail in the monster coffin if one was needed. They had bigger fish to fry at the time but it's been suggested that if there weren't he would have been tried, found clearly guilty, and then executed. Bright Bart fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 09:25
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Mokotow posted:I was driving around Belgrade yesterday and was surprised by the number of nationalist murals and Косово је Србија graffiti in around the main plazas - turns out it’s the 25th anniversary of the NATO bombings. Seems like everyone is talking about Ukraine all the time. That's a good description of Belgrade, except the “hmm no regulations does mean the food is tastier” part which I don't even know how to parse. As for Vojvodina, it's autonomous in name only. It has another layer of bureaucracy, probably a small budget to spend on roads or schools, and that's it. There are no pro-autonomy parties or political initiatives. It used to have actual autonomy in Yugoslavia, but those days are long gone.
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Apr 4, 2024 10:07
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I'm jealous about Serbia trip. I really need to visit that region someday.. I just need to convince rest of the family to ignore Croatia and go further south.
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Apr 4, 2024 10:24
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Doctor Malaver posted:That's a good description of Belgrade, except the “hmm no regulations does mean the food is tastier” part which I don't even know how to parse. There’s this undercurrent in developed countries that produce from less developed countries (also: less regulated) is better, fresh, etc. In Poland, we tend to consider bread as something that was “lost” due to, I dunno, EU regulations, and “you can’t get bread like you used to!”. The worst part is I agree! I think bread used to be much better, and I recon so was meat. In Poland, we’ve almost completely moved away from small farm meat production and changed to large conglomerates, and it’s kinda poo poo now. On the other hand, we just had a few people keel over because a dude was producing sausages in his backyard without any regulations and he used the wrong kind of gelatin. And this what I mean is “maybe it’s a load of bullshit, but the meat I had in Belgrade these last two days was amazing”.
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Apr 4, 2024 11:00
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The museum of military history in Belgrade is worth a trip. "In this room, see how noble Yugoslavia is participating in UN peace keeping operations in the 60s." "In this room, see how evil NATO is bombarding poor, helpless Serbia." With absolutely nothing in between.
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Apr 4, 2024 11:03
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In general less developed countries have better cuisines. But that's not across the board. The northern part of Vietnam has had blander, simpler dishes out of necessity way before the country split. Tibetian, real Tibetian from before the Chinese annexation, is barely based on food at all. It's based on butter, uncooked grains, and imported tea. Things like dumplings and vegetables are a luxury. The real thing is basically the equivalent of subsisting on protein bars for every meal. As for quality of ingredient, I've read more than once that the absolute best meat, fruit, and vegetables came from the GDR, Poland, and Czechia. As they were too poor to entirely industrialze like France or the Netherlands, but not poor enough that they had to abandon all standards, regulations and traditional methods like some others did. But I don't think that's still the case. We add things like high-fructose corner syrups to the things we bragged about not adding it to. Things that they shouldn't have been added to anywhere. Bright Bart fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 11:12
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Meat and produce mostly tastes better in Poland imo than in the US, with the exception of beef & bacon. The beef here just doesn't have the full, rich flavor of american beef, and the bacon is just all wrong and far inferior. Though the US, being the heart of empire, has a much much much bigger selection. Beef & Roll, one of the local (Warsaw) food-truck/restaurants, used to import their beef from the US and it was incredible- but that was almost a decade ago. Since then I think they are using EU beef and the burgers just aren't nearly as good, in addition to all the normal quality problems that come when an establishment branches out from a single location to dozens. Meat: Pork is better in poland, the rest is equivalent or inferior. Produce: Mixed, smaller selection, but it's a lot easier to get farm-fresh stuff at markets in the city than in most of the US. Bread: No contest, Poland takes the crown easily, lapping the US many times over. Cheese & Dairy: Poland is cheese impoverished, but I do like Korycinskie and that grilled mountain cheese. Comte de Saint-Germain fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 11:19
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e: wrong thread
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Apr 4, 2024 11:24
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Mokotow posted:There’s this undercurrent in developed countries that produce from less developed countries (also: less regulated) is better, fresh, etc. In Poland, we tend to consider bread as something that was “lost” due to, I dunno, EU regulations, and “you can’t get bread like you used to!”. The worst part is I agree! I think bread used to be much better, and I recon so was meat. The bread in Croatia is better now than when I was a kid. We have many more varieties now and the bread lasts much longer. The bakeries are abundant and affordable. When I lived in Amsterdam, the choice was crappy pre-cut bread in plastic, or artisanal bakeries with heart attack-inducing prices. Is that what it's like now in Poland? In any case, I doubt regulation as such is the main factor. The worst food I had was in Russia and Peru, which I assume aren't very regulated. BTW we too are losing the "home slaughtering" custom and I'm sad to see it go, but regulation is only a minor part of it. The major part is people leaving villages or staying but giving up on farming animals. You can't find home made sausages as easily as 30 years ago, but the quality of food in restaurants didn't suffer. And you can still find good butcheries with their own meat, at least in Zagreb. Doctor Malaver fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 11:28
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The bread here isn't all that bad compared to other places. It's ironically our pastries, at least the ones you get in the shops, that are disappointing. Bread is absolutely fine. It falls maybe third place to a tie between Lithuania and Latvia. You want to see bad bread? Try Scotland. The CO-OP (good chain; good people!) had sourdough but there's maybe two varieties and it's made like the ones at Lidl here. Everything else, everywhere else was sliced white bread (what we call toast bread). There was not a single real bakery in my city of ~250,000 people. I mentioned this and people laughed and told me of course there are but after looking it up for like five minutes the only place they could mention was a famous one but had been shut down years ago. The proper bread came frozen from the Lithuania/Latvia/Poland and carried a steep premium. Here I can get sourdough baked on-site in wood-fire ovens. At the mall. alex314 posted:Raiffeisen basically doesn't exist in Poland anymore. They always felt UBS/HSBC/RBS levels sleazy anyway. They had a really nice office on Jerozolimskie though, always copped a free coffee when I've visited. I hope your leaching was the reason they scaled down! Honestly I rarely criticize others outright because I'm far from perfect. But this just sickens me. Their only excuse is something like that if they don't do these things then they'll fail in Russia and then Russians won't have a cooperative bank, or that they'll even get taken over by the state and then Russia will control all its assets. (I don't know enough about modern banking to know if that's plausible or not. Isn't all the money just data on computers anyways? If Poland forcefully took Citibank over, for instance, would the world banking infrastructure just sit there and take it or would they be like okay those numbers on those servers are worthless we don't recognize them but the US Citibank now has an extra $500 billion?) -- If it seems like I'm spamming instead of working for your hard earned tax dollars just now, I'm trying to forget the things I'm seeing at work. I promise I am doing good and have pictures to prove but you may lose your breakfast.
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Apr 4, 2024 11:31
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Bright Bart posted:
Sorry about your bad luck! My mom grew up in Ottawa and had a Serb boyfriend, who was a fun dude apparently. She also went to high school with the Aykroyd brothers, which I will envy forever. Anyhow, I’ve had bad luck meeting Russians and was rightly shat on for on these here forums for making sweeping generalizations based on those experiences. Having said that, just like in 90’s Poland, the preferred look for men aged 0 to 55 in Belgrade is “I’m not parole and on my way to a football match”. As anywhere, it helps to travel with a toddler - all doors magically open. Also, gave up on English halfway through Serbia, Polish works just fine which is awesome Mokotow fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 12:18
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Mokotow posted:There’s this undercurrent in developed countries that produce from less developed countries (also: less regulated) is better, fresh, etc. In Poland, we tend to consider bread as something that was “lost” due to, I dunno, EU regulations, and “you can’t get bread like you used to!”. The worst part is I agree! I think bread used to be much better, and I recon so was meat. E: Translated table from a 2003 comparison, in CZK 
mobby_6kl fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 13:43
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All I can see there is Polska Górą 
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Apr 4, 2024 13:53
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there's gotta be something lovely about the polish chicken.
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Apr 4, 2024 14:31
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The tomatoes aren't free in any of these countries at all!
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Apr 4, 2024 15:32
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goblin week posted:there's gotta be something lovely about the polish chicken. They're weird as gently caress https://i.imgur.com/oCazRWZ.mp4
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Apr 4, 2024 15:43
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:Meat and produce mostly tastes better in Poland imo than in the US, with the exception of beef & bacon. The beef here just doesn't have the full, rich flavor of american beef, and the bacon is just all wrong and far inferior. Though the US, being the heart of empire, has a much much much bigger selection. Can’t say I agree about the bacon. It’s one of the things I try to buy at Polish stores (I’m in NJ) because it’s so much better. Maybe I need to try fancier American bacon because what I’ve eaten really doesn’t compare.
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Apr 4, 2024 15:54
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Someone’s importing Polish bacon to the US? The times we live in. I got some of my preconceived notions checked today. I certainly did not expect to drive on one of the most picturesque and fun highways I evert took. It’s a super new two lane highway that starts as Pristina’s ringroad, then winds down a narrow valley towards Skopje for 30km. It’s also a feat of engineering. Amazing. Pristina has an awesome skyline with snow-capped mountains on the horizon. Kosovo seems to be booming. The amount of new constructions, EU businesses building plants and new housing is shocking. Oh, the US Army is here too with their Blackhawks n poo poo
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Apr 4, 2024 16:04
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Bright Bart posted:I would be real curious to learn how they acquired so much. Did they get rich and then buy back the company at a later point like has happened with a few of the firms complicit in war crimes/genocide? Did the Allies bring him back in to help run the company after the war?
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Apr 4, 2024 17:11
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Mokotow posted:Someone’s importing Polish bacon to the US? The times we live in. I’m actually not sure how much of the fresh stuff at these stores is imported, versus made here but ~differently~. Whatever it is, I love it, but maybe this place just has particularly good bacon.
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Apr 4, 2024 17:17
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I thought Kosovo had absolute lunatic drivers, but then we came into Macedonia today and holy poo poo. It’s so bad that we decided to change our route and go around through Greece to reach the lakes on the other end of the country. Driving was extremely dangerous in Poland in the early 90’s. Was it this Mad Max insanity level like it is here, cars just driving everywhere, including opposite lanes and ignoring any and all street lights? I remember it was bad, I don’t think this bad, but it was 30 years ago. Going back to the Kosovo part of the trip, the EU is pumping an insane amount of money there. When you get to Niš on the highway south from Belgrade, there’s a highway offramp and a few kilometers of a beautiful 1+2 road. It ends abruptly and you have to spend the next 60km to Kosovo on a winding a gradually debilitating road. There’s a truck of bored Serbian soldiers, and the road winds up a sad and garbage-strewn hill, as if leading to someone’s backyard and suddenly you’re in this massive brand new EU border terminal and the whole Pristina valley stretching behind you. This is a connecting point of a new major route the EU is funding in Serbia from Niš that will bypass all these sad and desolate valleys. Despite what “the internet” said, the border terminal is staffed both by Serbs and Kosovars. Interesting thing is if you come into Kosovo from outside Serbia, you won’t be allowed into Serbia proper. I’m now wondering if we came from Serbia but left through Macedonia, we’ll be allowed back into Serbia, sine we technically left illegally  .As I mentioned, Kosovo is booming. Construction is everywhere and the investment going into infrastructure is insane. It looks like the EU is funding a large light-manufacturing sector and planning a transit route through Serbia. While Serbs are putting on a tough face, they’re cooperating across all fronts and happy to take EU money to build the new border crossing with Hungary (pro tip: Hungarian border crossing with Serbia sucks and it’s all due to the Hungarian border guards being shitheads. The route running from Pristina to Macedonia is also being built on the Macedonian side. There’s already a highway from Pristina to Montenegro, so if you connect the Croatian highways, you get a whole new transit route from Triest to Greece and Turkey. Are any of the Balkan countries considered Eastern Europe? (Flips counter to “0” days)
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Apr 4, 2024 17:54
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Mokotow posted:
...All of it? With maybe excluding the of parts that until world wars were directly parts of Austria or Italy. And that is a big maybe.
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Apr 4, 2024 18:04
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Mokotow posted:I thought Kosovo had absolute lunatic drivers, but then we came into Macedonia today and holy poo poo. It’s so bad that we decided to change our route and go around through Greece to reach the lakes on the other end of the country.  Doesn't have the rest of the Balkan countries in question but based on their neighbors I can only imagine it was complete carnage in the 90s
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Apr 4, 2024 19:16
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The Balkans are so EE that they make Greece an honorary member of the club by association. Which is really sad because in terms of natural beauty they surpass any and every other part of Europe.
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Apr 4, 2024 19:49
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