7 Reasons why I left the beach house of my dreams after six years

Almost everyone has a dream in life. This is often what gives us the strength to endure difficult times and keeps us fighting and working to achieve it. Sooner or later, the hardworking ones manage to realize their dreams. However, sometimes reality turns out to be very different from what we had imagined. According to the latest surveys, 40% of the world’s population lives in coastal regions and these people are generally happier.

I want to explain to the readers of incredible.club why for a long time I dreamed of living in a house on the beach and how reality made me change my plans.

I had a dream that sounded perfect. A gleaming white house, hidden in the shade of century-old trees, on the edge of a vast deserted beach, with a wooden path running along the sand and leading straight to the blue sea. A place where you can hear the sound of crashing waves and see beautiful seabirds in the sky.

The house of my dreams would be surrounded by a wide porch, on which there would be two squeaky armchairs and an aged wooden table, where my husband and I would sit and drink coffee, admiring the scenery and enjoying the breeze. Not to mention the sea, with its warm waters, ideal for a dip at any time.

The first 30 years of my life I lived on the shores of the Baltic Sea, or rather, in the part called the Gulf of Finland. Our Nordic nature looked impressive and beautiful, but only from a distance. As you get closer, you end up losing the desire to swim: the water is dirty and it gets very cold ten months a year. I wanted to live near a sea where I could swim year-round without having to endure icy waters.

When we had the opportunity, we moved to a place with a warm climate and a tropical sea, where we could swim in the salty waves 12 months of the year. We chose a small tourist town to live in, imagining a paradisiacal life in the home of our dreams.

We had no plans to buy the coveted house, so we started looking for places to rent. The prices surprised us a little and we realized that our dreams would have to wait a little longer. If you choose a tourist city as a permanent place of residence, it is better to go there during the off-season.

Owners set the rental price depending on the time of year. It was cheaper in the less popular season and twice as much in the high season. After a long and tiring negotiation, we got a reasonable price because we were going to rent the property for a long time.

Our first house was big, but a long way from the beach. So we decided that if we moved here, we should look for something closer to the sea. So we found a smaller house, but 100 meters from the beach. I was finally able to have a balcony, albeit with two stools instead of armchairs. Breakfast overlooking green palm trees and blue waves was really fantastic. However, we had to cut corners to pay the exorbitant rent.

To pay for the house, we had to work, but it was very difficult to do anything in such a picturesque place. Ours laptops gathered dust, while we spent the whole day at sea. We realized that the environment around us was really relaxing and associated with vacations, and that it would be difficult to focus our minds on work.

All my fantasies about creating masterpieces while watching the sea were fading away. It was getting harder and harder to pay the rent, so we had to cover the windows with heavy curtains to finally get to work.

I still hoped to dive into the waves early in the morning, before a morning cup of coffee and a day’s work. But laziness ended up being stronger than willpower. Why rush into the sea before breakfast when you can swim in the afternoon too? Even better, at sunset. Or maybe the next day, since we would be living there for a long time and the sea would not go anywhere.

As a result, after several months, we only went to the beach once a week. When my friends asked me how often I swam in the ocean, I just replied, “What do you think?” Because when I told the truth, everyone was confused.

I arrived here with my hair in great shape, with several bottles of my favorite hair dye. I didn’t even use half of them. Several unsuccessful experiments proved that the hair dye lasted only two weeks here, as the color faded due to sunlight and sea breezes. Also, my wavy hair turned into unruly strands that looked like a loofah. Due to the high humidity, it did not dry out and was very difficult to comb.

All clothes also faded quickly. After each wash, our garments took forever to dry in the humid air. To top it off, there was always some whitish residue on them. My favorite swimsuit lost its color and shape after a month of daily swimming. The sea was merciless to our clothes. Now, when I see the phrase “freshness of the sea” on a package of washing powder, I get nervous.

The sea made me give up wearing prescription glasses. I started wearing contact lenses because I needed to clean my glasses every five minutes. They were covered with tiny droplets and everything was foggy and blurry. By the end of the day, the salt was starting to really irritate my eyes. After a while, my friends got used to the fact that, at a certain point, I started to water and start blowing my nose.

When we moved in, our sweet home was spotless and painted, as it had just been renovated. Just a few months later, I started to notice stains appearing on the walls. They started to increase in size and then became moldy. It was then that I learned about mold.

The mold was tenacious and indestructible. Even chlorine couldn’t remove it. We even tried to cover up the stains, but we gave up. The mold just grew and got worse.

In the bathroom, we had to clean the mold two to three times a week. It seemed to grow overnight. And in the kitchen, the painted walls (including the ceiling) began to be covered with bubbles that burst at the most unexpected moments. Mold was everywhere in our house: on the curtains, on the clothes, on the shoes, on the toys and on the cameras. Only here I realized that mold can even grow on plastic.

Only the metal did not become covered with mold, but all metallic things rusted. All the cables on our computers and consoles were covered in rust. After six months, my husband’s computer looked like it spent that time under the sea. Some programmers we know even told that in their house there was a special room where all the computers were, with the air conditioning always on, to reduce the humidity.

If you live in a resort town, you quickly get used to the huge amount of people. At the height of high season, there are far more visitors than locals. And the entire population is instantly divided into two groups: “locals” and “tourists”.

Visitors didn’t bother me, because I didn’t spend much time on the beach. Only in the low season could I take a night walk on the beach. At the top, the scenery didn’t look so fantastic with all that crowd of tourists.

Another important thing about the city where we lived was that all of its infrastructure catered mainly to tourists. Because of this, the quality of some things to buy is worse and the prices higher. There aren’t many supermarkets and most meals are “holiday food”: chips, chocolate bars, nuts and other snacks. The rest are souvenir shops, swimming gear and the like. To buy something healthier and different, we needed to go to a nearby town.

The food in most restaurants isn’t very good either. The kitchen caters to tourists, which meant there was no reason to strive for quality, as people would leave in a few weeks and others would follow in their places.

The entertainment available included several bars, clubs and cafes. Once, a theater group came to perform and as the tourists were not interested, the performers never returned. However, the sea can be admired every day. Infinitely.

When you go on vacation, you end up not noticing many of the bad things around you. And even if you do, those bad impressions are often simply erased by the good ones. However, when you live with something bad for several years in a row, you will no longer fail to notice it.

The sea became dirty mainly after severe storms, when all plastic and garbage (bottles, containers, glasses, straws and much more), which floated elsewhere, washed ashore. What else he had were plastic bags, the number of which seemed to outnumber marine animals! It was really unpleasant to swim in this water.

The sea got dirtier every year, and it’s not easy to look at it with indifference when you live 100 meters from the beach. It is one thing to know something and another to be a living witness. We picked up the trash every time we went swimming, but we ended up not having a good time. Now, I honestly hate disposable cups, bags, straws and plastics in general.

In general, living by the sea is good for your health, but we all get sick from time to time. And finding a good doctor in beach towns is not an easy task. There were usually only two doctors, who were mainly supposed to treat hotel guests. It all depended on medical insurance. And the more procedures and drugs a doctor prescribed, the more he earned. The two doctors we knew were good people, but we didn’t want them to be our doctors. You can’t generalize, saying it’s like this in all small beach towns, but for us, it was a reality.

Other options for life in the big city were also hard to come by. Nurseries, kindergartens and schools for children, for example, were not easy to find. In fact, virtually anyone could open an educational institution. There were a lot of kids where we lived, so these establishments came and went very quickly.

Strangest of all, we get tired of endless summer. We were used to having four distinct seasons, and the constant heat felt unnatural. Finally, we decided to change our climate and place of residence. But not much, because we wouldn’t be able to survive a harsh winter anymore after so many years living in a warm place.

We moved to Tbilisi, where there are snow capped mountains 200 kilometers away…