To be or not to be!

To be what you may ask! To be a citizen of Poland.

I, as you can probably guess, am a British Citizen (one of the three possible types, which on a recent internet search I was intrigued to discover existed).


I have lived here (Poland) for three and a half years in that time I have resided legally thanks to my EU resident’s card.

Well generally this state of affairs is fine as I can exist quite happily like this. However, it restricts my voting (I think, but actually haven't checked thoroughly) and it has some odd little side effects..

Last weekend my wife and i were in MediaMarkt in Łódź and we wanted to but a new hoover. It was only 500zł, but we wanted to establish a credit history with Lukas (the partner bank of MM). Therefore we said we'd pay 150zł in cash and the rest in 5 installments. In five months time we would then get letters offering huge amounts of credit (at least that was the plan).

The problem was that Lucas doesn't like foreigners (my suspicion is that its French roots detected my Englishness and bulked at the idea). When I say doesn’t like, maybe I’m stretching the story, but the result is the same, they don't give credit to foreigners full stop.

In the end we had to buy it outright, which means no credit history. The funniest thing is that I have a 2 ½ year old car which was bought in Poland primarily on credit (that was an Italian bank though :) ).