“Kombinować” very Polish word for a very Polish a activity/philosophy. To make things work / get something done / take care of something in way that work for us, but are not the expected way to do things (though, ‘kombinowanie’ is often actually expected). It might be doing a job using the tools that are available and not thise that should be used, it might be a genuine invention, It might be using your contacts for favour (like getting a doctor appointment), it might be plain cheating.

A little bit like ‘hacking’ and also can be a good thing or a bad thing.

“Wykombinuję coś” = “don’t worry I will take care of that” “Co za kombinator” = “what a cheaty bastard”

I have disabled auto-correction some time ago because it would make things worse more often than not. Used not to be that bad, if I remember correctly. Now I send a lot of typos, but at least the recipient has chance to guess what I meant.

Some politicians (mostly in PiS) are very anti-German (their main argument against our Prime Minister is that he is somehow a ‘German agent’), some give very mixed signals (our far right seems to love AfD while being proud of our WW2 heroes fighting Nazis). General public mostly do not care about Germans, except when influenced by those politics. Generally as a white person without eastern (Ukrainian or Russian) accent you should have nothing to worry about, unless you have very bad luck meeting people – most hate would be targeted to non-white and Ukrainians now (which still sucks, of course).

Just do not say you consider some parts of Poland to be German land and be careful mentioning Wrocław, Gdańsk or Szczecin ever being German cities – that would definitely trigger some people.

I have read it is ‘nothing but burned cakes’ and thought, that this quite specific and weird.

We have a ‘Mr Gwint’ shop in my city (‘gwint’ means ‘thread’ in Polish, and the word is probably familiar to The Witcher players). They mainly sell various fastenings, but also tools and other related stuff. They have a big note on the door ‘Only wholesale, no retail. Only full packaging.’ But whenever I went there and asked for some screws, they would sell me much less than the full package. Friendly (to the Polish standards, that is) and helpful, unlike the sign on the door. But I wouldn’t dare asking for just one or two basic screws.