Teen Times/Bartosz Madajewski: My friends in Ireland talk a lot about football. I'm not that interested in football, but I'm trying to think about it.
We - my sister Adriana, who is 16, my mother Malgorzata and my father Slawek - came to Dublin from Gdansk in Poland last July. People are not well-paid in Poland. I knew nothing at all about Ireland before we came here, except that there were now job opportunities available in Ireland. We came to Ireland because my Dad said there were too many Polish people already in England.
We left our rented apartment and sold our furniture, everything. I was able to keep my clothes and very important things, like photographs. My father's a welder, and my mother's a cleaner.
I spoke English quite not well when I got here first, but I am getting better. The first thing I thought about Dublin when I got here was how many monuments and statues there were. And there are no trees, no forests. I write letters and e-mails to my friends in Gdansk, but I have not seen any of them since leaving Poland. I have been out of Dublin only once, to Trim Castle, on a school tour.
I miss Polish bread, straight from the bakery. And sausages. They are very hard to find here. I think Irish teenagers like money; they can be materialistic. In Gdansk, everyone is into computers, more than here - where they love football!
I have changed since coming to Ireland; I am better at studying. In Poland, the school day often starts at 8am and goes through until sometimes 6pm, but there are a lot of breaks in between which make it hard to keep your attention. I like maths, French, English, IT, but not history. I don't know anything about Irish history yet, or what the Taoiseach is or who it is. But I don't have to learn Irish.
Bartosz Madajewski (13) is a first-year student at James's Street CBS, Dublin. In conversation with Rosita Boland
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