The 'ol handshake

One of the most noticeable etiquette differences between Poland and the United States concerns handshakes and physical embraces. I still don't have all of the finer points down yet, and I feel like I should learn them quickly lest I appear unpleasant, stand-offish or rude.

Interestingly enough, I haven't really noticed a difference in other physical aspects of etiquette. For example, the sense of personal space and a personal "bubble" is about the same here as it is in the States (and thus very different from, say, Latin America). Straight people of the same sex will walk arm-in-arm here or women will hold hands in public, though it seems to me that most of the men who will walk arm-in-arm are older. However, the biggest single difference is that people love to pump the flesh over here.

Generally, if you are a male in Poland you should shake hands with another male, regardless of setting:

1) When meeting someone for the first time ever.
2) When seeing someone for the first time today.
3) Any time you enter somebody's house.
4) When you see somebody you see regularly for the first time on a particular day.
5) Before you leave for the day and/or part company with someone on a particular day. Generally applies to somebody you work with or share an office with.
6) With every other male in a group of people that you plan to be with for longer than about 5 minutes. Doesn't matter if all of them except the guy you want to talk to are strangers. Doubly important if you're doing something like choir: go down the line and shake with people!
7) If you are simply in doubt as to whether to present your hand or not.

Make it a nice, bold hand offering. Stick it out there like you're proud of it. For the two-handed handshake, it seems to be more in the style of grabbing your counterpart's right elbow with your left hand than cupping the other party's hand in your own. 

With women it's a lot trickier. As far as I can tell, women shake hands when they first meet somebody and/or in a business setting, but that's about it. They also seem to tend to affect the "limp mackerel" style of handshake. Older people will engage in hand-kissing, but that's considered weird if practiced by anyone under about 50. Women tend not to go hugging each other in public, or at least not as much as they do in the States. I get the sense that men and women don't hug as much as they do in the States, or if they do so it is on a much more thorough acquaintance. Indeed, I think I've surprised a number of people by hugging them when parting. I'm not so sure if the "bear hug" between men has caught on here or not. In theory, Poles do the whole Euro-cheek-kiss thing, but I haven't actually seen that much of it around. Schoolchildren walking in the street walk in double-file and hold hands while doing so.

This has gotten me to thinking about handshake conventions in the United States, and how we're actually a lot vaguer as to when one is appropriate. Sure, in business or the first time you meet somebody it is appropriate to shake, as well as in settings where you haven't seen somebody for a long time. However, the handshake is often indicative of a kind of formal or physical distance between people who know each other. You don't shake hands with people you don't really know just because they're there, and you don't shake hands with your closest friends every time you see them. If you see somebody every day, you generally don't shake hands with them. However, this doesn't seem to be a very general rule as I usually would shake hands with my friends or with my uncle or grandfather (in the latter case usually coupled with a hug). Ultimately, after having formally written down cases in which a handshake is appropriate in Poland, the list doesn't look that different from what's normal in the United States particularly as we have a very wide range of "normal". However, all I can say is that the conventions are somehow noticeably different. Ultimately, it seems like handshakes are more a thing of personal preference in the States than they are over here: there's less of a range of normal behavior.

I actually like the hand-shaking etiquette here as far as I can make it out. It just seems friendlier. What does seem strange, though, is that greetings and goodbyes between genders seem a bit more stilted here as women and men will generally nod to each other rather than shake hands or hug as they would in the States.

This is yet another excellent illustration of how sometimes the most familiar things are the most foreign, and how sometimes it is the little differences that really set places apart. In Japan, an American would expect manners to be different, but in Poland they would probably expect them to be about the same. They just aren't, in very small ways.