Over analysis of a 4 second incident

I take a sip of my drink and look over to see the Stag laughing and dancing his way around the dance floor. Five minutes earlier he had been told that two of the ladies in this bar were the ones we had danced with in the previous evenings karaoke club.

‘Hiya, we were in the same pub yesterday’ said the Stag, ‘I was wearing a dress.... do you remember?'

The lady looks back, questioningly. The eight of us not on the dance floor are grinning, then laughing, then struggling to not pass out laughing as the Stag realises that this isn’t the pair from last night.

Suddenly, I get kicked in the back. The short sharp pain makes me wince as I fall down the two steps of my vantage point at the bar. My mind races. Adrenaline flows. I look back behind me in search of an explanation...

Poland was a fantastic trip. I went expecting (naively) a bland European country, like Belgium or Holland and found it to be anything but. However, while I am again experiencing a low-after-the-high feeling of a weekend done well, the good times were due to the company, not the hosts. All of the laughs came in spite of, rather than because of the locals we encountered. I have never felt less welcomed as I have explored a city.

I guess id better get explaining.

The females were simply beautiful; very pretty, amazing bodies and always immaculately turned out. The few 'nice' locals we met were of the female variety- the two hostel receptionists, for example, were always chatty and helpful and interested in what we were up to.

The males were very, very dismissive, and probably 60-70% of them skin heads with an obvious devotion to pumping copious volumes of both iron and steroids in the gym. They were not friendly.

Back in the bar and I can see that the owner of the foot that has just dispatched me on a stair-surfing escapade belongs to one of these locals, who along with his friend stares coldly back at me, goading me into retaliation. I fight the urge to react instinctively and fight. The protagonist remains on his stool, I look around and recognise that only one friend has seen what has happened. He, like me seems unsure of what action should follow. In the next two seconds a tidal wave of thoughts crash through my head.

I decide that the best thing* to do is to ignore him. I turn back around and warn a few of the friends nearest to me, but don’t want to cause everyone to look around, which might be like waving a naked flame next to the barrel of petrol that sits behind me. A few minutes later and the two guys push past me, and then through the dance floor, knocking two local women over as they leave. I’m boiling like a kettle that has had the switch jammed on.

Later the same night another local guy nonchalantly pushed past a toilet queue and takes great offence at me when I ask him what he thinks he’s doing (I normally wouldn’t have cared, but was still upset from before). On the last night another three meatheads push through the group when we are outside, then walk around and do it again, just to be sure we weren’t up for a fight. Luckily the group were all sensible, really sound guys and we were finding the whole aggressive thing quite funny by then, calling it ‘Polish hospitality.’ We also experienced a lot of hostility from shop owners, waiters and the like, who either ignored us completely or asked us to leave before we’d even sat down. The public, especially at the airport, were also difficult and would queue jump, push and shove or just tut and do anything other than stand in line and wait. Being English, good queue etiquette is in my genes and I get really wound up with people who don’t respect it.

I guess that one explanation is the supply of brain dead Stag parties that come through the city, acting up and giving the Brits a bad name. This seems likely, but I don’t want to let Krakow off the hook that easily- other popular Stag destinations I’ve been to, such as Amsterdam, Prague, Cardiff and Barcelona have all managed to remain user friendly, despite probably getting far more groups than Krakow does.

*There is obviously a balance between letting a complete idiot kick you in the back and not reacting to it, and maintaining certain core principles of what is right and wrong, even if standing up for them means definitely getting into a fight. Ive thought a lot about this over the last few days. Ive only ever been in 3 fights and a few sport related skirmishes in my whole life, all of them stemming from similar situations where someone has stepped so far over the line that it found it impossible not to retaliate. However, I can see that if it had all kicked off in the bar (which it probably would have if the same guy had done the same thing in my local) the chances of me or someone else in the group getting hurt suddenly gets very high, which would obviously have spoiled the weekend. The very fact that I did find myself able to ignore him, suggests that I probably should have, and it all turned out alright in the end.