Wide context

Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

/^t/Initially, there was this irresistable glamour of the West - as the land of wealth, joy and happiness, but a hard work at the same time. The image of a hard-working, middle-class citizen of France or Germany was like the ikon for plenty of Poles emmigrating to these countries - willing to work for ten times higher wages than in Poland. They could do this, at first, under the condition of submitting a proof stating that they had been politically discriminated. A significantly large part of our society became west-oriented - lingering for better - capitalist times, which we as a nation enjoyed in the period between the two World Wars.