I'm Polish.

My mother (early 50s) still remembers clay houses that had two rooms, one for the people, one for the cows and the chickens. She never lived in one, but her grandmother did and she would visit for summer.

She would help her parents stand in line in the evening, waiting for a shipment of pasta or coffee to arrive in their local grocery store in the morning.

My father (similar age) didn't have an in-house bathroom until he got married.

Both of them had black-and-white TVs, where they'd see wonders like microwaves, answering machines or game consoles. Those were things that rich Americans had in movies, not things normal people had in their homes.

If you were well--off enough to go on vacation, you'd probably go to a seaside town, or maybe a village in the mountains. Certainly not abroad. A passport was an extravagance, not easy to get from the communist government.

People who lived in big cities, as opposed to much smaller villages, which were and still are a big thing in Poland, were a bit better off, but not by much.

In the 90s, My parents' village got wired up for telephone. Around that same time, Vietnamese NES clones (here called Pegasus) started popping up on the market. They may have been 15 years behind what the Americans had, but they were available at a price that almost any family could afford.

Shortly after I was born, they got a computer. At that time, computers were still expensive, not something every single family had, but definitely not something unusual for a working / middle class family to purchase. Satellite digital TV soon followed, and then came ADSL internet; because of no flat-rate calls, dial-up never really took off here.

As kids and young teenagers, we looked on iPods and iPhones with envy, those were for the rich, but knock-off mp3 players and cheap Nokia phones were things that many kids had.

Our train company, PKP, was famous for delayed trains and poor service. We used to expand the abbreviation as "Just wait, it'll arrive eventually."

None of this is true any more. Go to any Polish city now, and it's no different from any other European country, maybe except for being a good bit safer. You will see people with iPhones; we're still majority Android, but now that's mostly choice and habit rather than financial necessity. You will see people order food on Uber Eats using their gigabit fiber internet, and then Uber back from a night out. They may not even need to do that; both men and women feel pretty safe on the streets here, even at night. You will see kids playing their favorite games, on their PS5. You will see college students, working on weekends and after classes to make some money, take their boyfriends and girlfriends on trips to Greece, Italy or Spain. By airplane, of course.

That train company? In theory, the reputation is still there, but in practice, the statistics say what they say, we've far surpassed Deutsche Bahn in terms of punctuality.