Poland Work & study

Work

Without a high standard of Polish, most people will need to arrange a job in Poland through an international company or be prepared to teach English. English teachers are currently in hot demand, with schools popping up in cities and towns across the country. Teacher standards are generally high, however, and you’ll probably need a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate to secure a job.

English-language supplements, such as the Warsaw Voice (www.warsawvoice.pl), sometimes advertise jobs in various fields.

Business hours

Consider the following as a rough guide only; hours can vary considerably from shop to shop (or office to office) and from the city to the village.

Most grocery shops open from 7am or 8am to 6pm or 7pm on weekdays and to around 2pm on Saturday. Delicatessens and supermarkets usually stay open longer, until 8pm or 9pm (and are often open on Sunday from 9am to 7pm), and there’s at least one food shop in every major town and every district of the city that opens for 24 hours. Shops normally open at 10am and close at 6pm (at 2pm or 3pm on Saturday). The office working day is theoretically eight hours long, Monday to Friday, and there’s usually no lunch break.

In the larger towns and cities, banks keep their doors open from 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday and 9am to 1pm Saturday, and in smaller hamlets from 9am to around 4.30pm weekdays only.

Larger city post offices are normally open from 8am to 8pm weekdays and 8am to 1pm Saturday, and one will usually stay open 24 hours. In smaller localities, business hours may only be until 4pm weekdays.

Restaurants tend to open between 11am and 11pm, while opening hours for bars vary greatly; it is, however, a given that most stay open well after midnight on Friday and Saturday.

There are no standard opening hours for museums and other attractions. Most museums are closed on Monday; some of them also stay closed on the day following a public holiday. Many museums close one or two hours earlier in the low season, and usually stop selling tickets half an hour (sometimes even one hour) before their official closing time.

Churches are a bigger puzzle. The major churches in the main cities are often open all day long. On the other hand, rural churches in small villages will almost always be locked except during Mass, which may be only on Sunday morning.