Finding Beauty In The Ordinary. A Different Side Of Poland With Ben Aitken

In this wide-ranging interview with Ben Aitken, we talk about challenging cultural stereotypes, identifying as the ‘Other,’ and how to find beauty in the ordinary, as well as thoughts on where to visit and what to eat and drink when visiting Poland.

Ben Aitken is a freelance writer, playwright, and the author of three travel books. Today, we’re talking about his book, A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland.

Show notes

• The relationship between the UK and Poland and how that changed while Ben lived there during the referendum
• How travel can change attitudes
• Finding beauty in the ordinary
• Recommendations for food, drink, and places to consider visiting in Poland
• The joy of travel without planning
• The possibility of a return to more local travel in the wake of the pandemic
• Why Ben chooses unusual trips like taking coach tours with the elderly as he writes about in his latest book, The Gran Tour
• Recommended books about Poland

You can find Ben Aitken at BenAitken.com

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Ben Aitken is a freelance writer, playwright, and the author of three travel books. Today, we’re talking about his book, A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland. Welcome, Ben.

Ben: Hello, there. Good day. I should say good day because I’m down under. I’m locked down under.

Jo: Locked down under indeed. But you are a Brit.

Let’s just start with the question of why Poland and what sparked that trip in the first place?

Ben: What sparked that trip? Curiosity. It was a bit of an Alice in Wonderland-style adventure down an unusual Eastern rabbit hole. Of course, a lot of Poles had moved to the UK since 2004 so there was a new relationship with the country and a lot of the coverage of the country and the people was limited, sometimes negative.

I’m always in the mood to challenge the received wisdom and go on an adventure and hopefully return with a bigger picture and a bit more understanding.

Jo: We get a lot of international listeners to the show who might not understand how Polish people are part of life in the UK. You and I both being British. I live in Bath in the Southwest, we have a Polish supermarket, generally, a lot of British people will know Polish people. But to anyone listening who might not understand how our culture works. Explain a bit more about why, a few years ago, people started coming here.

Ben: In 2004 Poland, along with a few other countries in that part of the continent, joined the European Union, which enabled its people to work and live in any of the 27 member states of the European Union. And an awful lot of them, perhaps over a million, it’s difficult to know exactly, chose to come, and live, and work, and study, and bring up children in the UK. And that’s a significant number.

Polish is now the second most spoken language in the UK, and that happened quite quickly and it was quite exciting, to be honest, but other people reacted in a different way to the migration, as I’m sure you know, and as I’m sure people can understand. It doesn’t always strike people as a good thing or a progressive thing. But for me, it is those things. It is good and it is progressive, and it just gave me new things to consider doing and new places to consider looking at.

Jo: And I guess we should also say we’re recording this in June 2020. Because I read it quite recently, going through that at a time of Brexit is kind of crazy. Officially, Britain has left the EU now although, of course, you wrote the book over that period, didn’t you?

Ben: Yes, that was an interesting element of the year and the narrative and the journey. I knew that Britain was about to have a referendum. I didn’t expect the result would be that Britain would be leaving the European Union. That happened about a quarter of the way into my year in Poland and it did alter things a little bit.

Prior to the referendum, the Polish people had responded to me exclusively positively. After the referendum, less exclusively positively, because the way that that result was interpreted rightly or wrongly was that the Polish people were no longer welcome in the UK because it was interpreted that the UK wa...