Hello!

It's finally September. One of only two months with consistently good weather (the other is May). Very glad to be out of the heatwave months. Of course, I say that but we'll probably have the hottest September ever 🤷‍♂️

Polish stuff

I recently discovered that the iconic UK store Poundland exists in Poland. But here it's called Dealz. It looks pretty much the same, despite the willfully embarrassing 2000s-Internet spelling.

It turns out Dealz also exists in Ireland and Spain. I'm disappointed not to have seen them there in person too.

But having gone into a Dealz looking for nappies, I can tell you that it wasn't actually that good a deal. I went to Lidl instead. I have always had a soft spot for Lidl because it has the best unofficial theme tune of any shop.

I did question this long-held belief though when I found this Poundland theme tune, made by Mr Poundland, an eccentric gentleman in a top hat from Birmingham. But the fact he shot the video in a Poundland with actual staff means it's perhaps too legitimately endorsed to appreciate fully.

For that tiny minority of Lidl shoppers who don't like grime, Lidl has another song worth checking out, this cover of Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohn remade to be Shopping in Lidl. It has over 4 million views, so I hope they recouped the cost of the clearly very expensive video.

The Poles are into shop theme tunes too. Here is a rap battle between Żabka and Biedronka. I think Żabka has the sickest rhymes because they are always open on Sundays.

At this point, I have to stop us going down this shop-theme-tune rabbit hole any further before we all lose our minds.

Non-Polish stuff

Today saw the release of the final episode of Stories From The Eastern West 😥

After about 6 years, our podcast is coming to an end! Somebody at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute might still want the show to continue but all of us who created and made the show have moved on. We are very proud of the show and what we achieved with it. It had nearly a quarter of a million downloads too, so a few people seemed to like it too.

The final episode is about the Baltic Way, which was a human chain across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia held during the 1989 revolutions that brought down communism across Europe. So yes, it's non-Polish for the last episode and counts for this Non-Polish Stuff section 😉

Elsewhere, during the Ship 30 writing course we've been encouraged to post Twitter threads. I am kind of tired of seeing threads in my Twitter feed - they have become all pervasive over the last couple of years. But actually writing them is really fun. I've made them before for work, but this is the first time I've had some formal training in them. Here's one I made about my Wim Hof Method breathing habit.

I even made a Twitter thread for the final episode of the SFTEW podcast...

Fun fact of the week

The first person to win Wimbledon thought tennis was rubbish.

"He preferred cricket and predicted that lawn tennis would not catch on."

Our family visited the Wimbledon Tennis Museum the other week and I was delighted to learn this fact. I am very happy to share it here with you.

That's quite enough for this week. Hope you enjoy these first few days of September and look after yourselves 😊

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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