As we had determined earlier, Polish national sport is complaining. Not doing it for a whole day is against the Polish Nature, and is known to cause hemorrhage, cardiac arrest, spontaneous combustion and hair loss. Nevertheless I decided to take the risk and write a piece that actually praises Poland. So here we go.
1. Surgery. There's a small local hospital at Trzebnica, near Wroclaw. They have a world class surgical team, specialized in hand transplantations. Their recent success is transplantation of two hands at once. Only five hospitals in the world did that. Operation lasted for 17 hours, the hand donor was a women. The receiver was male special ops soldier, who lost his hands in Iraq.
2. Heroes. We've got plenty of them. Some of them are bogus, and are scheduled to be ridiculed in this blog. But we have a lot of real deals, some of them really incredible, like Irena Sendler [1, 2].
3. IT skills in general public. Polish edition of Wikipedia is 4th biggest in the number of articles after English, German and French. That's fantastic considering that Polish language has only about 40 million native speakers [3] and Polish as the second language isn't very popular [4].
4. Programmers. Look at TopCoder [5] statistics [6]. Poland is 3rd after Russia and China, which have much more participants (China over five times more).
5. Rescue teams from KGHM Polska Miedz have achieved good results in the International Mine Rescue Competition. They won the first place in the years 2000 and 2004 and third place in 2008. This kind of rescue operations is extremely specialized; it demands very unique skills and equipment. That team is helping with natural disaster all over the world.
6. Elite soldiers. Polish special ops soldiers from the GROM unit [7] have been deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Kosovo, Macedonia, East Croatia and probably more. They worked with their counterparts from other NATO countries.
7. Girls. There are countries where you can become gay by accident, since both sexes look alike. I won't tell you which country I have in mind particularly, but I'm starting to understand, why they have started so many wars. Girls rules in this country. Pretty like a flower, smart like a google, angel-shaped little marvels, all of them, perhaps only excluding those with an engineering degree.
8. Bread. Polish bread is the best. I've read that Polish Shops in London were originally created to serve Poles in voluntary economically-based exile, but expanded their target group to anyone, who has any taste left after years of eating McShite, Tesco muffins and other junk food.
9. Natural resources. Prior to joining UE, Poland has been severely underdeveloped (when compared with UE average). Preserving most of the natural resources is one of the few advantages of that. After joining UE Poland is forced to develop sustainably.
Ad. 6. If you mention GROM, do not forget FORMOZA. Operators of this formation are also present in, let's say, 'stabilization' missions.
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