One of the joys of having taken over an existing and well-loved secret bijou holiday destination is that we’ve inherited some guests who are long-term regular visitors to this house.
Pan Z and Pani D are with us now and have been here already on twelve occasions. As luck would have it, their thirteenth visit is with the new owners. Will they still like the place after it has been in our hands for a while?
They seemed to know more about what is actually here than we do. For example, the other night they were able to show us where there was a grill that is used with the campfire. I didn’t even know it was there. This saved our bacon, or whatever „karkówka” is in English. I am so ill-versed in the ways of the barbecue, grill, campfire, cook-out or however you call it that I thought you could cook karkowka on spikes just ike they do with sausages. The face-palming by locals was almost audible. But ok, we have lived so far in locations where you simply aren’t allowed to have a grill in your yard, and if we went to one outside, then it was organised and someone else was doing the grilling. So actually I never really experienced doing an open-air grill.
We had a lovely group yesterday for a hen party. Pan Z and Pani D warned us that we should be on our guard, as on one of the occasions they had been here before a hen party had let off a lot of confetti into the swimming pool that clogged up all the workings and needed a total change of water.
That’s when I wrote the penalty for doing that into the GTCs – if anyon wants to know where that sentence came from.
PLN 5,000 may sem a lot to you, but in fact the water in a 12*6*1.5 metre pool, which has already been treated chemically regularly in order to be just right, certainly doesn’t cost less than that. When you think about it it comes to a penny a litre and you certainly can’t get it that cheap in Tescos. Confetti isn’t the first thing that springs to mind, maybe, when one thinks of things that can render a pool’s entire water content as needing replacement, but that’s what happened back then.
If someone wants to have a holiday with access to a private pool, they cannot expect it to be as cheap as at a place without a pool because you may be the only Guest in the pool for days on end, but maintaining the pool costs much more than maintaining the rooms. But it is a treat, a luxury that speaks for itself, you can feel like a Bond villain, minus the sharks swimming around it of course. That’s in the sitting room, but it’s just an Epalzeorhynchus bicolor, and even Ian Fleming’s dodgy ichthyology (see Mr Big getting bitten in pieces by a leopard shark, which is such a laugh) wouldn’t stretch to that particular „shark” anybody any harm.
Anyway, this time I had a lovely, cultured group of very educated and civilised ladies here who behaved themselves very nicely. The stories I heard about the lewd behaviour of that other group and what else they got up to besides clogging up the pool I simply cannot repeat here, on a family website.
One of the very interesting tales Pan Z told us was of an occasion when he was here andthe former owner got a call from someone saying that they had arrived in Świdnica and couldn’t find Letnica anywhere. It turned out they had gone to the much better known city of the same name which is about 200 km to the south. It has 60,000 people whereas our Świdnica, in whose Borough the village of Letnica lies, only has a tenth of that number.
People also get Zielona Góra and Jelenia Góra confused, as they are both „Berg” places, like the thing that sunk the Titanic, and just as cold in winter.
That’s why I have a map on the right-hand side margin on every page of this site. There’s no excuse for not knowing where we are!
Another tale we heard from this veteran couple concerned one German visitor who, on hearing that on the news they said that ball lightning had been seen in the Lubuskie. He immmediately panicked and got ready to run for his car, expecting thunderbolts to land on him at any minute. The fact is that the phenomenon is so rare that if there is any sighting at all it is newsworthy. That was why it was no the news, rather than as a huge hazard. But when you go abroad I suppose there is a bit of a tendency to expect that the the rare is actually commonplace.
On that note I remember my 1982 visit to Jagdschloss Glienicke next to the Glienicke bridge that was famous for swaps of prisoners such as spies between East and West (something that has become topical again recently). I remember feeling disappointed that in my twenty minutes or so of gazing at the bridge I did not see one single spy swap.