Polish Obsession and Eastern Europeans

It's the way I am.  I learn by obsession.  I immerse myself in a subject to learn about it.  Desperate to practice what I have learned, no matter how small, as a way of ensuring I remember.  At first, the seemingly impossible, vast and bewildering collections of consonants, posed a challenge for a chap unaccustomed to the Polish tongue. I got so used to the struggle that, in the early days of learning, I'd catch myself trying to pronounce car registration plates as a reflex action.  Ever eager to try out my appalling pronunciation on random unwitting Poles, I'd leap at the chance if I heard even the vaguest Slavic accent.  I have learned several things from this:

1 - There's more Bulgarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Romanians and Slovakians in my place of work than I thought.

2 - An awful lot of people from central and eastern Europe are polyglots - they speak multiple languages - so do understand what I am saying, if not exactly why.

3 - It seems that I never tire of making a prat out of myself.

A thought crossed my mind when I mentioned eastern Europe in the second point.  Before you consider calling a Polish person eastern European, first check the exits, but before that, consider the extent of Europe and Poland's position within it.  Take the western edge of Europe as Cape Roca in Portugal and the Ural mountains of Russia as the eastern limit before Asia, then the centre point of East and West is pretty much through Lithuania and not even skimming the eastern border of Poland.  Tylko mówię.  Just saying.