20 east

Poles are gadget freaks.

Perhaps it is the fact that their country was lost for so many years but, judging by the torrent of Xmas offers for satellite/GPS navigation systems, there’s no question that the Poles have a deep need to know exactly where they stand!

This has been a growing trend over the last, oooh, 2-3 years I’d say. Gradually more people have tried to discuss with me the ins & outs of the latest Tom-Tom, Bling-Bling or Navbuster gadget. They soon realise they picked the wrong guy and move onto another gadget-obsessed Pole. Taxi drivers have slowly but surely built an amazing array of Heath Robinson window mounted devices to demonstrate their priority lies with tracking the journey from A to B, rather than seeing out of the windscreen. More important than the actual navigation assistance is the ability to demonstrate their in-car electronics skills through the spaghetti of cables hanging from every orifice and their mastery of modern technology by spending the first 20 minutes of your journey prodding a small computer with a stylus so they can show you a map so small that the driver needs binoculars to see it, let alone me in the back seat! I swear, if I ordered a taxi to go from home to Plac Wilsona (an amazingly simple journey of about 2 minutes), most of them would spend more time fiddling with the sat-nav than actually driving. Well, the taxi drivers and the other 32 million sat-nav freak Poles, are going to be over the moon this Xmas as the gadget shops have obviously decided that 2007 is the year of sat-nav saturation.

The only serious competition is from LCD HD TVs. These things run sat-nav a close race in terms of being a “must have” item for Polish households. It is, you understand, very important for one’s status to be able to show guests to your home how you have obscured at least half of your entire wall space with LCD screen. The rule is simple, never mind the quality, look at the size! 42″ screens are now considered a bit on the small side and to be, as we are, completely without an LCD screen in the lounge is probably grounds for deportation. We have a lot of paintings on our walls and are worried that we’ve run out of space for more. How are we supposed to find room for a massive LCD TV? Anybody know a country where not having an gigantic LCD TV is still legal?

As an example of how desperate people are to get their hands on a giant screen, by far the largest billboard on my way home is from one of the local electro mega stores. It offers an outdated, not particularly good, but nevertheless giant screen on credit terms “raty”. You can sign up for 30 monthly payments of 147 PLN ($60, €40, 30 GBP) and take the thing home for Xmas. Thus, the greedy bastards (only one way of looking at it) feed the credit mountain by bringing LCD wallpaper to the homes of even those who cannot afford to pay for it. I suppose the upside is that there will be more vacancies for “credit controllers” somewhere between now and next Xmas. I fully expect to see billboards offering 3kg of heroin on similar easy terms before I die.

Where’s the line between the two? At what time is it appropriate to say “late at night” versus “early in the morning” (possibly needing a “very”?). We all know that scientifically speaking, midnight is the watershed but we’re often still up at that time along with many others so it’s a bit silly really.

This morning is “Mikołajki” – so called because today is the name day for anyone called Mikołaj and as Santa Claus in Polish is Święty Mikołaj (Saint Nicholas) it becomes his name day as well. Santa Claus’ name day is celebrated by leaving small gifts overnight for big or small children to find this morning in their slipper, or whatever. It is a very cute tradition but one I am sadly prone to forget without the aid of an electronic gadget to beep at me, something I am currently “between”. Fortunately, we (that is my wife) planned ahead and so Santa had stuff for Zosia, and me, but he had to scramble around looking for something for Marta late last night. Bad Santa!!

Anyway, back on topic. Zosia was excited about this and was trying to stay awake to catch sight of St. Nick. She dropped off eventually but woke again at around 01:30 and found the eaten mandarin and some presents. She was thrilled and amazed, as only a child can be, and I thought I’d mention it. This led me into the question of whether 01:30 is late night, or early morning?

Personally, I’d draw the line at around 02:30. I consider 02:00 to still be night but 03:00 to be early morning. I suspect that this line is however, a very personal thing with quite a wide variation. I’m assuming it is also be something that has moved considerably over the years what with the invention of electricity and modern living versus ploughing fields and mounting crusades.

Perhaps the time is right to create a special part of the day between say 22:00 and 02:00 and name it “Nighmorn”, “Darkdawn” or something?