It took us more than 2 hours, but it was totally worth it for the weather has been very cooperative, although the online forecast told us that it’d be raining all week long.
Upon arrival, GPS told us to cross a bridge that was not there. We called and were told that the street shown on the map had been closed for a while now and since then every tourist has been standing in front of an imaginary bridge when they first arrived. If you happened to be a bus driver and forget to take the reception hotline with you, or arrive after 6Pm, the chances are you would be sitting in your car and pull out your hair one by one. Not sure why the closure of the bridge was never official, but if I had been there years ago and convinced of its existence, I would probably call a doctor to see if I suffer from schizophrenia.
The apartment is lovely – directly at the port and we wake up with seagull every morning. There is only less than 2 meters from our back door to the water, and since the sky has been mostly clearly blue, the water looks heavenly. A few colorful boats are anchored or moored at the port. It is the low season, which means that we are the only ones in the building. Whenever we step out of the door, there is a sense of peace fills up this place, with the exception of gophers – the blind creatures mark their territories even at our door steps; the tourists say “aw”, gardeners scream. This is a circa 25 M² studio, with two closets: one for storage, one serves as kitchen. Behind the closet doors we found a sink, a small refrigerator, a hot plate and a few nails on which two pots and a frying pan are hanged. I suppose all that cooking is not good for the wooden closet, but it’d also be a big mess to have grease on the wall and the ceiling. Cooking in a closet, who would have guessed?
In the past few days we visited the island Usedom, Swinemünde and Stettin in Poland. Usedom has small towns that really give you cute small town feelings – cobble stone streets, old tiny houses, white sand beach, and we found a small shop that sells home-made wool products; the shop keeper even spin the yard herself! But over the weekend almost everything is closed (Saturdays some of them close at 11 am or 1pm), but in Swinemünde, PL everything is open, no matter what day of the week. When you keep going south, until Stettin, you will see amazingly beautiful beaches, but sadly there are more and more house / mall are being erected right in front of the coast, which is not good at all for the environment. The city centers are basically one or two huge blocks of mall, next to 4 or 5 star hotels while across the street is a 10 storage building in which there are more than 1000 people live. The east side of the place is the most illustrative examples of extremes, either you stay in the 5-star hotel or you live across the street with the apartment number like sz-4589. Also driving in Poland is quite adventurous: the streets are not well marked, people drive backwards, and there is no absolute guarantee that you wouldn’t drive into a street trolley, which shares the same car lane as you do. But the food is more than nice, and my favorite is 8-layer banana cake – yes, I counted, there are 8 layers.
The fall has just arrived and the foliage is unspeakable beautiful. Between towns forests are magically colorful. Sometimes I wish I could just be a part time druid and understand the spirit of plants. There is a middle-age interactive project (http://www.ukranenland.de) in the town of Torgelow. The museum is long term project started about 15 years ago; there were houses of smiths’, hunters’, tailors’ hand built, they keep animals and crops, and there are always people who could play middle-age music and make sword using the techniques applied more than 700 years ago. It is a seasonal museum for in the winter it’s really too cold for there is no electricity. There are people who work there for free out of pure interest and since we are at the end of the season (they close this Sunday and we were there Tuesday), all of the workers there took time and guided us through the buildings and ships one by one. I had never learned so much about Germanic, Nordic and Slavic folks. This is the place where I shot bow and arrow (real Robin Hood style) for the first time, and this is probably the only place you would get the chance to do anything alike. If I can finish my school work early (on time) somehow next summer, it’d be totally thinkable to spend 3months there to work for free. It is in the middle of a forest, with a blue creek, pretty sheep and lovely people. So right, in the summer time, they even organize school projects; children could help building up a castle or learn how to work with animals and make peace with nature.
Never leave out the Zoo in the middle of nature land, although it has been a while since the last time I was in a Tierpark. The one in Ueckermünde is another moment of sweetness: Instead of having visitors randomly throwing food to the animals, there are “Futter-Automaten” stand at almost every corner. It costs one euro to take out a box of animal food, and on the machine it says “If the vending machines are empty, our animals are full”. Sheep, goats, horses and donkeys stay close to the machines, so every time someone throws in an euro, they all run up and waiting for their snack. I couldn’t stop going back to the vending machine, for there were very few people around and all these cute bunnies and horses totally melt my heart. Too bad that we did not get to pat the lions, but I guess deer food wouldn’t be really enough for any big cat. Ueckermünde Tierpark is the only place I found so far which provides such vending machines, I hope that there will be more zoos that do the same -- one of the best ways to support the place and make sure what we give to the animals are not soaked in bacon fat and deep fried.
After 5 hours of walking on the beach and arrow shooting in the middle age museum, we needed some spa time. We found in our apartment pamphlet that on Tuesday nights we could book a 4-hour spa for about 10 euros each: a bus would drive us to the spa and take us home at 21:30. Around 17:30, we took the shuttle to the spa, which is in a 3-star hotel und as we walked up to the reception and asked about the deal, the manager told us that the spa area was not ready, one of the saunas was broken and the cleaning ladies would take about 2 hours more to clean the place.
We took a walk. What else could you do? In the middle of nowhere without a car. We called the chauffeur and asked if he could come half an hour later – if we only had 90 minutes to get in and out of a “wellness resort”, it’d be slightly tight.
Luckily enough, our shuttle driver was incredibly nice.
Finally, after walking on the beach with frozen nose and fingers as the only choice, the spa was ready when we got to the reception for the second time. The manager told us that we’d be the only ones tonight. O…K… why not.
The truth is: both Saunas are broken, soap is nowhere to be found, I don’t know when the last time they cleaned the pool, but it was milky and full of dirt, one of the relax rooms is below freezing point, and the only half-functioning places are solarium and infra-red cabinet: but we had to pay extra (1 euro for 10 minutes)! On top of which, there were hair on the solarium bed and the ceiling was dropping water. We ended up spending most of the time changing coins at the bar counter upstairs and stay in the infra-red cabinet, so that our body temperature would stay normal: had to pull through that 90 minutes somehow, I truly wished that there had been a coffee vending machine somewhere. Luckily we brought our own towels, the manager did not even bother to ask; she cashed up and went away.
Oh well, so much for the spa.
GPS is our best friend, for we decide our next destination almost as spontaneously and randomly as if we threw darts on a map hanging on a wall. At the very east side of the country is the best place for smoked fish; for after their family business building, there is only blank in our GPS screen. It looks like they had been in the business for generations and they are always proud of their location. On the maps, their house is right next to the blue ocean and on screen, they mark the end of the land and the beginning of unknown. Speaking of unknown, as we drove through the island of Usedom and tried to come back through the only bridge on the south side, there was a jam right in front of the bridge. Most of the people were locals, and most of them got out of the car and lit a smoke as the line got longer and longer. Well, it was only less than 10 minutes later, someone, someone completely random in his car coming from other direction (he was at the beginning of the jam and made a U-turn), yelled out “The bridge is broken!”. Right after that, most of the people decided to make a U-turn too and on their way heading for the bridge in north, which is more than 80 kilometer away.
So, some random guy yelled out the bridge was broken, and most of the people listened. We took a left turn towards along the coast, headed for the port where summer ferries are, parked the car next to the ships and took a walk – the fact is: we did not know what caused the jam and how long it’d last. How strange just listen to some random guy’s yell and decided to drive across the island again hoping the other bridge is open? People always doubt how effective propagandas are, but look, there are locals who make U-Turns and make that extra 80 kilometers because of a random statement floating out of a car window!
About 20 minutes later, we drove back to the bridge entrance, everything was alright again. Maybe the worker who was supposed to open the bridge was just 15 minutes late; or the computer screwed up for a quarter, but whatever it was, it took less than half an hour. People don’t have patience, people want fast results, and people would believe whatever it is out there without verifying the source, but this is nothing new.
We still have another few days here. Tomorrow in our Hafen big boats will be towed out of the water, starting 9am. Bis morgen, seagulls and wild ducks; loud crows and blind gophers.
Since the WiFi connection is irregular here, if I can’t load the pictures for this blog tonight, will try again very soon.
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