Monday June 5th - Nie mowie po polsku

After a three night stay in the cheap bungalow, we left Swinoujscie this morning. About time too, as we seemed to have fallen into a tourist trap for Germans - plenty of tacky market stalls, overpriced waffle vans and obnoxious music. We ate at a fish restaurant yesterday evening evening, not a particularly good meal for us but at least the mosquitoes ate well. We're now in Miedzyzdroje, which we also can't pronounce. It's a little nicer and has some lovely parks. Today we ate our picnic at a chess table in a playground, while watching a bunch of Polish blokes play ping pong. We then went to play on a seesaw, and then took a walk down the beach.

The beaches are beautiful here, quiet clean and relatively empty (at this time of year, at least). Even in Swinoujscie, the seafront is well shielded off from all the touristy rubbish, so you can pretend it doesn't exist once you get down to the sand. Today we saw swans swimming in the sea.

It wasn't hard to find a room here. Coming through town, it was harder to pick out the houses which didn't have rooms to let. We knocked on a couple of doors and managed to get a room for 50zl per night. That's about 9 quid. It's a tiny room and the bed takes up half of it. Our panniers take up half of the other half of it, and there's just enough room for us! We have about 15 quid a day in interest off our combined savings, we could almost do this except that we have no cooking facilities so if we don't want sandwiches for lunch and dinner, we have to eat out and that takes us over budget.

We're looking to rent an apartment in Poland on a 2-3 month lease so we can hopefully keep under budget and spend the summer here - so we popped into an immobilien in Swinoujscie to see if they had anything. The lady said no we don't have anything, but printed out a list of apartments from the town website - unfortunately they all turned out to be holiday rentals at holiday rental prices. There are immobiliens here in Miedzyzdroje but for some reason today they all appeared to be closed, despite their opening hours claiming otherwise. Perhaps we've stumbled over another national holiday and haven't quite realised. We'll try again tomorrow, but we may well end up back in Szczecin trying to sort things out there. Which is no great hardship now that we've found the lovely Brama cafe, and also learned that there is a Dutch pancake restaurant in the city. Mmmm...