by Sam Schramski

Miedzydroje is actually quite pronounceable.  It is best if you utter its name with a heated tongue depressor stuck firmly in your palate.  These are possile to purchase at the apoteka in Hel should you be coming here en route from that aforementioned place.  Although it is quite pronounceable, there are invariably difficult interactions you are bound to have if you attempt to reach this little coastal resort town because the road to it is as treacherous as the old fame of Mouse Trap, which has since been discontinued, even in Eastern or New Europe.

 I found that it was easiest to come here by rickshaw, carried on the back of an elderly Polish woman, to which I am thankful had the physique of the pekaos or bison this country is given to.  She had the tenacity and the wherewithal to trudge through coastal forest and swampland often when the road was only shoulders' width--not her's--and the ground not hospitable to great weights.  I suggest a rickshaw, namely because everything else is essentially toilsome and a bus that gets stuck in the brackish waters of Pomerania is a truly horrible sight in that you are forced to listen to some painful Polish pop singers, most of whom have modeled themselves on an admixture of Britney Spears and Lou Reed.

      Miedzydroje itself is quite a handsome town in the cheeky British sense of the word.  At its axis sits the PTTK, or Polish tourism agency, though there are rumors that the only agency it has is the distribution of falsified maps that often have glowering faces at the ends of streets that dead end, false markers of money exchange offices, and the like.  At its north end sits the quite popular outlet for German U-boats and drunken Polish lovers, both always tragic because they end up drowned.  The coastal cliffs of the area are spectacular to be superlative, especially when the sun sets much later during the day than I'm accustomed to.  It's a sort of white fire, a central heat vacuum that reminds me much of the solar plant prints I used to make in summer school; just as the UV light infiltrated the photopaper, the marked outline of the plant specimen gets imprinted much like a botanical shadow.  The rest of the town doesn't have as much motion, though there's a decent pierogarnia in the pits of a pub called U Wółęńąż.  Served here was a rare variety of the dough tasties that didn't leave me with a gassy swimbladder.

      As in all cases in Poland, you're better off mankind do with your own housing, because half the time you're charged for linens, when in fact you're given none.  This might well be a vestige of Western European hosteling tradition, though it carries on in hotels as well, and that is simply the proprietors assume that years of tradition have demanded the surcharge for towels and sheets that there's little reason to fly in the face of that traditon, right?  It's not as if the pieces of linen in question are actually valuable to begin with, either.

      I do recommend, however, quite a lovely little locale known as the Jana Pawl II wolne pokoje.  Here everything is made papal, from the mirror in your living quarters to the stovetop surfaces that recite encyclicals in Johnny's withered wheeze.  And the only way to get a hold of the place's owner is by falling on bended knee (literally) in simulacrum of an altar kept at the front door.  The wooden fixtures bent and the bronze headins are little more than masked tinsel at this point, but Jan Pawl or any person thereof answering will burst forth in all his raiments will bless you wholeheartedly.  And it is quite amazing how seamlessly they seem to switch from Polish into German.

      When young Polish socialites dream of their nomadic getaways, they often dream of Miedzydroje, because of the Germans that are literally and atmospherically next door.  They come for these coastal headlands, the steadying roll of the ocean waves and the forested berms of the beaches.  They are enterprised by the truculence and the splendidness of the triumvirate section of trails, a series known as the three prongs of vainglory.  The first is the green, a wonderful little section of allegory through some beautiful deciduous trees, but by the end all that's left of the forested veneer is a series of stumps and the rigamarole mechanical parts ranging from the quizzical (hot dog toilet paper) to the bonhomie (televisions). The red trail is for the passionate amongst us, a truly sordid tract of earth interlaced with areas where youths, and presumably elders as well, have had their way with each other and the undergrowth of plant life as well.  Everything from 200m onward is open territory for the naturists among us, and their uninhibited lovemaking kin.  The path is a nicely pocked, macadamized section of road that is, among other things, much abused by vehicular use.  For this reason it might well be termed a road by most standards and should be accordingly feared if not downright avoided on most occasions.

      In all cases one should be abundantly clear that these trails reveal nothing before envisioned in any national park, or even city park in your country of origin.  And thus the end of national identity.

Average user rating

   (0 vote)