the Poles I find hard to summarise. yes they have a well-known resting angry face and Slavic folk have a reputation for being scary, but once you accept that the facial language as just a cultural thing, they way they talk and act is actually way less intimidating than Germans, and they're also culturally much more amenable to conversation with strangers. if you drink alcohol you have a big advantage in bonding. they will kinda shower you in souvenirs and gifts and handcrafted little wonders like the Japanese. I don't have as much experience with Slavic people generally but I found all the Ukrainians and Russians and Croatians I've talked to actually very easy to befriend, in contrast with their image in the West. like if you invite a Pole or Ukrainian to go somewhere they'll actually go with you. if I could pick I'd much rather live in a Slavic country than Germany (though I'd probably pick Croatia or Montenegro or something, for the climate, though they're still too damn cold…)

some cultural things: Poles like talking about negative things but they don't let it like, paralyse them. it's more a like "you think *this* is a bad neighborhood? back in Poland we went uphill both ways…" kind of thing. In many ways Poles resemble Asian cultures to me, they're unexpectedly collective-type in many regards. For example, expressing negative emotions is a form of bonding, if they do it that means they're seeing you as a friend, while pride is toned down even between friends https://journals.pan.pl/dlibra/show-content?id=99862 . this has to be navigated by us Brazilians, who culturally value optimism and looking on the sunny side of things. if you do it just right you can be the ray of sunlight for them, but that can be only possible if you are willing to engage with the "Polish culture of complaining"; to be accepted as sunlight you have to be open to the austere appeal of a snowy landscape, so to speak.

I don't know enough Polish people to make a judgement but in my limited experience, they are more like than the Chinese than the Japanese in that they can easily resent foreigners coming up and making pronouncements about Poland being this or that without really understanding it. interest in Poland is still appreciated, but you have to make clear a position of humility (remember it's a culture generally averse to boasting). the idea that Polish names are hard to read or pronounce is a very common sore spot, and here you can get a lot of bonus points by putting in the work to learn to pronounce things, and most importantly don't be like a USA person who keeps talking about other people's languages as if it was some impossible ordeal. conversely, Poles who learn English or other languages come from an education system that highly depreciates their own language traits—I can barely looks for videos on Polish phonology on youtube without having to wade through endless channels about "accent elimination"—and unless you know someone feels positive about that you should refrain from commenting on a Polish accent, no matter how pretty you think it is, as it's often a sore spot too.

one common experience between Slavs and Latinoamericans is that a lot of us are read as "white" in Western Europe, and that doesn't really fit the model of what they expect a "migrant" to be, so Germans will kinda completely erase the historical and socioeconomic gap between you and them and treat you as "just one of the guys", as if you were the same as a Frenchwoman or an Italian, with absolute incuriosity about your personal history in the Second/Third World or the state of your country and its history etc. it's easy to bond with Poles by complaining about how the Germans treat you :3