Wide context

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

/^t/In 1989 after years of living behind the Iron Curtain, the majority of Poles desperately wanted to belong to Europe. It seems absurd, that while living almost in the very centre of the continent, we wished to "enter Europe". In the average Pole's mind Europe meant freedom and hope for better life. Not so long before, a visit to a western country was, for an ordinary citizen, almost impossible. We all remember those endless queues at passport bureau's, filling-in kilometres of forms, waiting for the day of announcing the list with names of those lucky people who were given the passport. If we were among those happy citizens of PRL (People's Republic of Poland, now Republic of Poland) we had to start queuing again, this time to get visas and then foreign currency. After all this, is it so difficult to understand that Poles dream to be real Europeans?