VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Jonathan Kuiper
🇵🇱 5 THINGS POLAND DOES BETTER THAN USA 🇺🇸
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Hey guys, how you doing? We're at the rushing water right now of Great Pond, flowing into Long Pond here in Val Grey Lakes, Maine. And for the first time in about 24 hours, the rain has let up enough for me to go for a little walk. And so, while I'm not really here to talk about Maine though, I'm here to talk about Poland, my home. Well, my home for the last year, until I came back about 10 days ago. And right now, while I'm down here looking at the water rushing in from one lake into the other, I am a little bit homesick to be honest. I am missing my adopted country, we'll say.
And to that end, I thought today I would share with you five things, that's right, five things that I think Poland does better than the United States. So join me and let's see if you either agree or disagree with my five things. So the first thing, and these are not in any particular order, the first thing I have to say will be the internet. And I know I'm showing you this vast open lake space, I know Poland has lakes as well, but when I was in Poland, what I found was that the internet rocked. It was awesome.
Even when I traveled to different cities across the country and some different villages, I found that the internet was surprisingly super reliable. The uploading speeds, especially for my YouTube vlogs, were very good and they were consistent. And when I was in Krakow, because I had the fiber optic, the speeds for me to put a 40 minute video up, usually took about 20 minutes. That's in comparison to here. Now, granted, I am in a rural part of the United States, but there is a major city about 20 minutes south of here. And I can also base this off of this assessment off of when I am in the Washington, D. C. area, which is the capital.
And I'll just say this, the internet here is not as good. I've been trying to get my phone signal will not allow me to connect in many parts of this region. Furthermore, if I'm at home using the Wi-Fi, let's just put it this way, to upload 1% of one of my most recent vlogs, it took 10 minutes, so I gave up. The fastest I have gotten it now for a 20 minute vlog was about an hour and 10 minutes to get it into the system. So it is painfully slow in some parts here, so I will just say kudos to you Poland, you do better at the internet.
And while we enjoy this park right here, walking around, I'm going to say it's a tie for parks, because honestly, I fell in love with Poland parks. This is about what does Poland do better. So Poland, you do public transportation 100,000% better than anywhere here in the United States. Granted, I can base it off of some major cities using their metro systems, but which they're about the same in some parts, like in the D. C. area, their metro system is great. But when you get out of D. C. and you get up to New Hampshire and in Maine, where I am, to be honest, you got to drive everywhere, like everywhere.
Like even if I lived in the city, there really are no buses. Walking is not really user friendly, there are sidewalks, but it's not like everything is super convenient for you to get to. Now maybe I was spoiled when I was in Krakow and when I went to Warsaw and to other cities, but I found if I wanted to visit somewhere on the weekend, I could just hop on a train and I could be pretty much wherever I wanted within a reasonable time frame. Same thing for the buses, getting and going. And here, you can ride the bus.
Like I can ride the bus from Augusta down to Boston, but it only leaves a few times a day and it's hit or miss. The cost is not as reasonable as one would think and it's not going to stop that much like along the way. So I'll just say this, if you don't have a car in the United States, you can't function very well. In Poland, you can. And I know that for a fact because I didn't. So kudos to you, Poland. Number two, you do it better. Okay, number three. Now this one, some people might disagree, but I'm going to say Poland, you have healthier food or at least it tastes healthier to me.
Now I probably shouldn't do this for comparison, but I'm going to compare fast food in Poland to fast food here. Because I figure if the fast food tastes healthier, then clearly it's probably healthier across the board. For example, McDonald's, the McDonald's McChicken here in the United States tastes like rubber. It has no life to it. It's like they threw it in a microwave, they let it sit there for three hours and put it underneath the heater and then said, here, here's your McChicken, enjoy it. Where the Poland McDonald's, the McChicken, it's very spry. It's crispy. It crunches when you bite into it and it just tastes fresh. You think I'm kidding, but it's true.
And I found that with not only the McChicken, but with other dishes as well. Getting out of the fast food family though, I will just say like even when you go to the stores and buy like your pre-made stuff, like some of the soups, I just felt like the soups didn't have as much salt in them as they do here. And when I would go out to eat, I just felt like, well, yes, the dishes might be a little bit more rich. I felt like that the products that they were getting, they were probably grown locally or in the European Union with less chemicals and preservatives. So by default, they were healthier for you.
And if I'm being totally honest, aside from pizza, I like Polish cuisine quite a bit. So again, another point for Poland, things you do better. So that was number three. So quick little recap. Number one was the internet. Number two was public transportation. Number three was food. And now for the final two. So number four, banking. I even know I experienced this in two different ways. I experienced this bringing a bank account with me from the United States to Poland and then, you know, having an actual local Polish account and then likewise now transitioning back. And I'm just going to say across the board, I think banking is a lot more functional and it's easier in Poland.
For one, you don't have something known as a check. You don't write checks. I don't need a checkbook if I'm going to transfer money to someone or I'm going to pay a bill. You just put in their number or you put in their account number and magically your money is transferred to them. That's also very cool, at least this was with my PNP account. I like the fact that if you don't have money in the account, guess what? They don't charge you like your car doesn't work. Where with here, if the American banks let you go into negative zone and what they do is they just keep taking out money charging you over and over again.
Now granted, I didn't really test this one out when I was in Poland, so maybe they do that too, but at least from my experience when I didn't have any money in my account because I was transferring stuff to different ones, I just couldn't use that card. Some of the security features that you guys have in Poland, they are just starting to use here. So like the tap access for your cards where you can put it on to a register to pay for something. My debit card here in the States still doesn't have that feature.
I did get a note though from my American bank stating that when I need a replacement card, all cards starting I guess next month will have that feature. So come on, they're a year behind. For the Blick, paying by your phone, all of these features, yes, we have them in the United States but they're not as prevalent and I wouldn't say, yeah, it's just not as commonplace. So for me, banking in Poland was a lot simpler and I also liked, and I should add these two things, I felt like any bank fees that I had, they were very minimal compared to what we have here.
And I like the fact because it's of where you're located, the multi-currency part of things where you could easily change money into different currency using my phone for the banking was great. I can't do that here. I can't do that with my US-based bank account. So those things alone, Poland, you win that one too. Now number five, and this is probably the most important one, at least if you saw my old vlog, my old channel, you'll understand kind of the humor in this one because we really haven't experienced this yet in the new channel, in the Travel with Mr. John one.
But the number five thing that Poland does better than the United States, drum roll please, is wedding dresses. That's right, wedding dresses. I felt like everywhere I went in Poland, when I was in Lublin, when I was in Warsaw, when I was in Gdansk, when I was in SÅ‚opoc, when I was in the city of, when I was in Lublinice, when I was in Rybnik, when I was in anywhere and everywhere, I always found myself in front of a wedding dress shop or shops.
If you go to the city of Bialystok, I always mispronounce that, I'm sorry guys, but when I go to that city, I was like on like Wedding Street Row, there were like ten wedding dress shops within a half a kilometer of one another, maybe a third of a kilometer. But the point is, we don't have that here. We have say yes to the dress wedding shows, but unless you go to like the deep south, to like Atlanta, Georgia, or to like some of the bigger cities, you go down to New York City, you go to Boston, we really don't have the wedding dress frequency that I noticed just in my travels.
Now granted, I say that and I know now as I look around, I might see a dress shop here and there, but truly, Poland, you dominate the wedding dress world. Well, my world, my traveling world. So that's my list. I know I can list more things, I could get into a lot more things, but for today, those are my top five. So again, to quick, a quick recap, the top five things that Poland does better than the United States, we got the internet, public transportation, food, banking, and wedding dresses. So what do you guys think of my list? Would you add something else? Would you take something away? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Put it in the comments.
Let's go back and forth and maybe I'll do another one of these, maybe things that the US does better, who knows, as opposed or maybe things that Poland does worse. I don't know. Anyway, let me know. All right, guys, cheers. .
S K R Y B O T
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