The Mallorca Chronicles
Wednesday, 21. September, 2011 This is a story about my trip to Mallorca, last February. I haven't had a chance to publish it yet, but here it is now. Enjoy!
The German winter of 2010 had been early, cold and unbelievably snowy. In fact, no one could remember ever having seen so much snow in my area. City streets were flanked by ploughed-up banks of snow so high you couldn’t see over top of them. Every now and then these banks would be interrupted by comically car-shaped hills, containing someone’s Volkswagen or BMW. People could be seen digging holes where license plates would be, in an effort to make sure that excavating the rest of the vehicle was time worth spending. Suffice it to say, the Germans were challenged that year and rather unimpressed by the effects of global warming.
By February 2011, the snow had all but melted and temperatures had settled in that strangely uncomfortable range just around the freezing point. While that’s rather mild for February, it is decidedly too cold for me. Two months in the white hell had eaten at my coping skills and my stiff upper lip had chapped. It was time to make an escape.
There aren’t too many options for really warm weather in Europe at this time of year, unless you want to spend five hours on a plane flying to the Canary Islands, where it’s always warm. But then, being located off the West coast of Morocco, the Canaries don’t really qualify as part of Europe, in my view.
Southern mainland Spain is always a possibility, of course, and I did contemplate it. With daytime temperatures safely above 15 degrees Celsius, it certainly qualified. However, there is a particular place in Spain that I had heard countless reports of, but never visited myself: the island of Mallorca.
I am not a mainstream person by any means. If everyone goes crazy about something, I will reliably pass. So, places like Mallorca usually don’t hold much interest for me. But the prospect of a short two-hour flight and a favorable weather forecast changed my mind. I was willing to give it a whirl, started my research and picked a small town on the island’s southwest coast called Paguera.
Unbelievably, 350 Euros (about $450) bought me a full week of accommodation at a 3-star hotel, including breakfast, roundtrip airfare and bus transfer from and to the airport. I have no idea who benefitted from this deal, other than me, but apparently someone did.
Chapter 2
The post-touchdown applause had subsided – German tourists apparently class successful landings as a form of entertainment – and the plane taxied to an apron parking position at sunny Palma airport. The baggage handlers I saw through my window were wearing short-sleeved shirts and Ray-Bans. I had come to the right place.
Palma airport is quite impressive in size and rather busy. Planes take off and land in the same “string of pearls” fashion you would normally expect to see in places like New York or London. However, Mallorca is a European tourist destination, a fact that is reflected in the size and denomination of planes, as well as the behavior of their passengers.
In my case, the crowd was of a rather advanced age, easily pleased, but incredibly slow. It took them almost 15 minutes to leave the plane and get onto shuttle buses parked in front. Interestingly, their slowness was accompanied by the maximum amount of stress, agitation and fidgety nervousness imaginable.
Once out of the airport itself, I was directed to a large parking lot for tour buses, which were there to gobble up all the new tourists and spit them out across the island. The drive to the hotel was relatively short and provided me with a good first impression of what to expect of my vacation.
Mallorca’s traffic system seemed to be well organized and built. There is none of the chaos one might know from places like Cairo for example. Mallorca is reassuringly European in this way, which made me feel that I hadn’t strayed too far from the civilized world.
The countryside can only be described as beautiful. It does have a rough edge to it, which is characterized by the amount of rocky mountain ranges and sparse, desert-like vegetation. Mediterranean light and the natural color of the soil provide Mallorca’s landscape with a faintly Martian appeal.
As pleased as I was with the scenery so far, the picture changed somewhat when my bus arrived in Paguera. I had learned about it on Wikipedia and Google Earth, so I knew it was a rather small community. However, the layout of this little town and its major attractions left me underwhelmed, to say the least. The main road leading through Paguera is lined with hotels, small restaurants and even smaller shops, selling shirts, sunglasses and jewelry. Most of the signs were in German, which bitterly confirmed all the rumors I had heard about the colonial character some areas of Mallorca seem to possess. There was a German Bank, German bakeries, German pubs, German realtors, German dentists and, of course, plenty of German people, most of whom were rather old, just like the ones I had encountered on the plane. A website about Paguera explains that young tourists don’t usually come here in the off-season, owing to the school vacation system in Germany. Put simply, I was stranded in a nicely tempered geriatric ward with palm trees, where everybody spoke my language.
When organizing my trip I had chosen the hotel online, based on reviews. My hotel had received the best ratings overall and was a fairly small, family-run business in a side street. A friendly Spanish couple in their fifties were the proprietors and received me with German questions about the weather back home. We all agreed it was quite miserable there and much nicer here. Breakfast hours began at 8.30 am and ended at 10.30. I only mention this here because on a trip to England, two months prior, the breakfast period ended at 8.30 after having started at the unimaginably freakish hour of 7 am. Who on earth can eat that early?
After checking in, I maneuvered myself and my luggage into the smallest elevator ever built – its floor space couldn’t have been bigger that 2 ft x 2 ft – and was reluctantly hoisted up to the second floor, where the folding doors parted with a squeak. My room was sufficiently spacious and comparatively well equipped. There were even a full-size refrigerator and a bidet. The TV set lacked a remote control and produced only static. But that was perfectly okay by me. I prefer to waste my time with other things.
It was lunchtime and breakfast on the plane – an uninspired chicken teriyaki sandwich – had left a gaping void in my stomach, so I went to town in search of sustenance. Hoping to avoid anything German I settled for a Spanish-looking restaurant on Main Street that advertized pizza. Can’t go wrong with that, I thought.
The pizza came and looked like pizza does. However, after having bitten off the first piece and chewing on it intently, it became obvious that there was no flavor to be extracted from it at all. I could just as well have eaten my hotel bed comforter with some cheese on top.
Having chalked up this incident to incredibly bad luck, the same evening I went to another restaurant and ordered Spaghetti with meat sauce, which produced the same effect, or no effect, as it were.
This all came as a considerable shock to me after having watched an interview with Jamie Oliver, in which he named French, Italian and Spanish food as the best in the world. I wondered if he had tried the food in this part of Spain before making that assessment, but then it occurred to me that Jamie Oliver was British. What could he possibly know about seasoning food? Don’t get me wrong. I think Jamie is a supremely inspiring human being with a passion for cooking, but having been raised on British food, his expectations in respect to flavor couldn’t possibly be that enormous.
By the third day I had become positively frustrated with my culinary options and went to the islands capital, Palma, which used to be called Palma de Mallorca, but the suffix had been officially dropped some years prior.
Palma is a big city by almost anyone’s standards. Half a million people live there and even in the off-season there are more tourists than one can wave a stick at. I was one of those tourists now and I did what tourists do: walking, taking pictures and trying on $300 sunglasses. I admire the Spanish people for looking so extraordinarily handsome in sunglasses. They have the faces for them. Placing their glasses on my nose usually just produces a chuckle. Only the sales people responded the same way whatever I put on: “Perfect.”
The city center of Palma is very beautiful. It consists of a network of fairly narrow streets and even narrower lanes with unfathomably small shops. Some of them weren’t bigger than the elevator in my hotel. There are small parks with wonderful wooden benches and refreshing fountains, shaded by majestic palm trees. Restaurants were often of the same multi-cultural type I had seen in Paguera, but this being a big city, there also were big, fancy restaurants and cafés. One of the remarkable ones was called Cappuccino. It had a very upscale but unaffected appeal, which was also reflected in its prices. I had a small glass of iced tea that cost five Euros (almost 7 dollars), but it was the best iced tea I had ever tasted.
My intentions for coming to Palma had been twofold. First, I thought, it would provide me with a good opportunity to take pictures. The warm light in this southern part of Europe produces much nicer photos than say, the bluish German winter sun. On the other hand I had hoped that finding tasty food would be much easier in a big city. With that in mind I walked into the greasiest and cheesiest place I could find – the Hard Rock Café opposite the yacht harbor. I ordered a blackened chicken concoction with pasta and Alfredo sauce. The meal was served by a tiny woman of Caribbean origin, who must have been in her mid-forties. However, she was dressed like an eighteen-year-old, leaving an understandably strange impression.
I am sure the pasta and sauce possessed all the calories one would expect from such a meal, but alas, there was no flavor. In an effort to salvage the expensive course, I used most of the salt and pepper provided at the table, but that really just made it worse. I couldn’t believe that an entire nation had apparently conspired against me and deprived me of something as basic and simple as seasoned food. Did I really have to visit the golden arches to stimulate my taste buds?
I left the Hardrock Café in a foul mood and went back into the city, to drown my frustration in some mindless shopping, yielding two leather belts, a light jacket, sunglasses, an expensive watch and a designer wallet.
Over all that shopping I hadn’t even realized that the sun was setting. Suddenly Palma was becoming much less attractive to me. I went to find the closest bus stop to get back to Paguera. Unfortunately, I took the wrong bus. Instead of catching the fast line, which only took about 30 minutes, I got on the slow bus. That line took the back roads and stopped approximately every mile, stretching 30 minutes to one hour and twenty minutes. To make matters worse, the bus was fogged up and fully loaded with old local people, who talked very loudly about matters of enormous significance, or so it seemed. The only thing sweetening this trip were two very attractive girls who stood right next to me and kissed passionately for long periods. When they didn’t kiss they spoke Spanish and giggled while glancing over to me. I knew where this was going. What the girls didn’t know was that I had had a rough couple of days and all I wanted was a savory meal and some kick-ass cocktails to drown the notion that Mallorca might not be such a bad place to commit suicide.
Buses on the island don’t indicate upcoming stops, so one is left to guessing regarding one’s location. Luckily, I guessed correctly and was dropped off in one of Paguera’s backstreets I had never seen before. In fact, the whole town looked rather strange, now that it was dark and empty. All the old people had gone to bed.
The first bar I could find was a cozy little place without customers, but two friendly sisters eager to let me sample the entire assortment of liqueurs, liquors and beers the island has to offer. Among them was a drink called Tunel, which I hereby recommend to everyone reading this, provided you are of legal drinking age. If you are not legal, just drink slowly. Tunel tastes just like cough syrup and will also make you cough, though only once.
The two sisters hailed from a far-flung place in Russia, but had been living on the island for years. It was from them that I learned some of the information I am imparting here. We had a very lively and friendly conversation in English until two Germans came into the bar and I was forced to switch to my mother tongue for reasons of courtesy. One of the new guests was a very friendly young man who also lived on the island and made his living there. The other was a rather squinty-eyed fellow who was at least fifty years old but hadn’t yet learned the difference between conversation and interrogation. He wanted to know everything there is to know about me, even my last name, which is a social no-go for most Germans when talking to strangers. Being a creative mind, however, I had no trouble at all providing him with an impromptu alternate personality, complete with its own CV and biographical tidbits. He now firmly believes to have met a person from a small town in Bavaria, who is fairly well to do and somewhat of a skiing professional. God bless him.
I left the little bar a few hours later, totally blitzed but reassured that there actually were people of my age on the island and not all hope was lost. Also, Olga, one of the Russian sisters, had given me explicit instructions on what places to visit, including restaurants and meals to order there.
I followed one of her instructions the next day and took a bus to Port Andratx, a ritzy community just 15 minutes west of Paguera. The “X” at the end of Andratx is pronounced like a “ch” as in “touch”.
Andratx doesn’t have a beach per se, but it has a port, as the name implies, with yachts as big as houses.
It was Saturday and the town was positively asleep. Nonetheless, I was able to take some really nice pictures and try more Spanish food. This time it wasn’t completely tasteless but extremely spicy. If in fact there was any flavor, my tongue wasn’t able to sense it, since it had been anaesthetized after the first bite.
Above the yacht harbor is a neighborhood with very expensive estates. I imagined that’s where the yacht owners lived. Interestingly, “se vende” (for sale) was signposted in front of most of these homes.
For a short moment I contemplated what kind of life I would lead as a resident of this town. What did people actually do here? What could they do, even if they were insanely rich? Stay in their houses, go to town for a cup of coffee or take their yacht out for a day at sea. That was all there was. What a dull and daunting prospect. Suddenly, I felt much better about living in Germany.
Back in Paguera the sun had disappeared and been replaced by dark clouds, heavy rain and a strong wind, which attracted lots of local surfers. There was little to do for non-surfers, however, and so I took a walk at the beach. By sheer accident I found a small restaurant called “La Vida”. It was run by a young German family and offered the full range of tasty German foods I had been craving since arriving on the island. It pained me to order German food in Spain, but after all I had given the local cuisine a fair shot.
I ordered fried liver with onion gravy and mashed potatoes, fully expecting a somewhat mediocre example of the dish. It was heaven! Whatever the area of the brain that processes the sensation of taste; it lit up like a Christmas tree. At that instant I understood why German tourists preferred eating German meals while in Spain. It was a simple matter of trial and error, just like the popular kids’ toy, which challenges toddlers to put a square object through a round hole until they get old enough to realize that they are being fucked with.
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