Home coming
The Boyfriend's mother was 5 years old when her mother drugged her and put her in a coal sack. She was then bundled aboard a boat heading from Poland to Sweden in an attempt to escape the German occupation. Her mother, who had disguised herself as a sailor to gain access to the boat, then kept her unconscious with "special medicine" as she smuggled herself and her young daughter across into England. It wasn't until a long time after The Boyfriend's grandmother died, Eastern Europe opened up, and Ryan Air started doing flights to Poland that The Boyfriend's mother ever considered visiting the land she had left in the middle of the night all those years ago.
Not long after this that we decided to experience what Poland had to offer and started investigating the property market in Poland.
Disappointed in what appeared to be a bubble economy in Estonia where rental properties were (allegedly) only being rented on short term lets (as in a matter of days rather than weeks) to other people looking to buy property, we moved on to Latvia, home of more gorgeous people, and a gorgeous capital city, but again featuring much higher prices than the internet had lead us to believe and then Lithuania, not so beautiful, and Poland.
One thing we hadn't counted on, mainly because we hadn't planned on leaving Estonia, was the problem of bank holidays. We arrived in Latvia with no Latvian money and no answer from any estate agents. Apparently estate agents in Eastern Europe don't work on bank holiday weekends. This was true of Lithuania and also Poland where they seemed to have an entire week of bank holidays, and not only did the estate agents not work but so didn't the bureau de change. Any reservations about the Euro went out of my head by the time we had changed our yen into Estonian Kroon, then to Latvian Lats, then Lithuanian Litas, then Polish Zloty.
We saw a lot of properties but to be honest we were starting to get jaded. Although there were some nice places for the most part everywhere was starting to look like a building site. The explosion of property investors seemed to be turning every city into a new build version of Slough (having never been to Slough that's probably a bit harsh).
Despite the fact the around this time the Polish government put in an official request to ask for some of their plumbers and plasterers back from the UK there seemed to be no let up in the building work going on around Warsaw. One of the nicest developments we saw was next to the Summer Palace, and when we say ‘next to' think about building a housing development going up in St James's Park and you get the idea as to the proximity to the palace.
The thing is the whole plan was to buy a very reasonably priced place in a place where we could work for a few years and rent it out when we chose to move - oh and ideally it should be near the sea. Warsaw has a lot of things going for it but near the sea it aint.
But faced with spiralling property costs, a flimsy rental market, and an uninspiring job market for non builders, we decided to compare the Polish property market to seaside towns that we knew in the UK.
The first thing that came up was a 2 bedroom flat in Margate (a childhood summer holiday haunt, near-ish to London) for £52,000. £50,000 less than anything we had viewed in Poland and in a country where we spoke the language, understood the buying process, and would have flexibility of the job market rather than just the English teaching.
As we looked around the grey concrete jungle that was Warsaw the thought of going home suddenly seemed like a phenomenal idea.