If you’re planning a vacation on the shores of the Baltic Sea, in northern Poland, you’d better buy or build yourself a space separator if you want to fit in. The bizarre accessory is apparently a must on Polish beaches, at least if you want to fit in with the crowd.
I was recently browsing through obscure Eastern-European pic dumps and news aggregators, as I usually do, when I came across a collection of strange beach photos where everyone had a cloth wall surrounding their little patch of sand. These things were everywhere, I had never seen anything like it before, and I was intrigued. Unfortunately apart from the title, “Polish Beach Introverts”, which hinted at a privacy-related purpose, there was no explanation as to why everybody was using them. So I started Googling all sorts of phrases that I hoped might shed some light on the mystery of Polish beach separators.
At first, I only found duplicates of the same collection of photos I had originally found, with no other information, but eventually I found a Russian site on Poland affairs that actually covered this “phenomenon” quite extensively.
