A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland

 

Not many Brits move to Poland to work in a fish and chip shop.

 

Fewer still come back wanting to be a Member of the European Parliament. 

 

In 2016 Ben Aitken moved to Poland while he still could. It wasn’t love that took him but curiosity: he wanted to know what the Poles in the UK had left behind. He flew to a place he’d never heard of and then accepted a job in a chip shop on the minimum wage.

 

When he wasn’t peeling potatoes he was on the road scratching the country’s surface: he milked cows with a Eurosceptic farmer; missed the bus to Auschwitz; spent Christmas with complete strangers and went to Gdansk to learn how communism got the chop. By the year’s end he had a better sense of what the Poles had turned their backs on – southern mountains, northern beaches, dumplings! – and an uncanny ability to bone cod.

 

This is a candid, funny and offbeat tale of a year as an unlikely immigrant.