More Mallorca!

I figured I'd better get back to journaling about my trip before I forget it all, but I've been a bit busy since I got back. So after our island tour I took the following day as a kind of laze around day, just going for a walk along the beach (although not as far as the nudist beach!!!) and reading by the pool. I can highly recommend it - having absolutely nothing to do, that is. 

Anyway the next day six of us had booked a trip to Palma, Mallorca's capital - me, the three Scottish ladies, and Irene and M (The One)! The trip there was a bit tedious because the guide did his spiel first in Spanish, then in English and finally in German but since people had booked different tours in Palma I guess he had to labour the detail a little! Our ticket basically just gave us a ride there and back, but people getting on at other hotels had different coloured tickets, which indicated maybe the aquarium tour and/or the guided tour of the cathedral. None of that was an option for us, but I was fine with that as I like to do my own thing anyway.

When we got off the bus the guide explained that the aquarium people should be at this spot at 10.30 and the cathedral people at noon, and M was adamant that they were booked on the cathedral tour. I told her she wasn't as that wasn't offered at our hotel but she was having none of it. In the end I've no idea if they showed up for the cathedral tour but Bernie, the little Scottish lady, just laughed and said to let them get on with it! So the four of us set off for a coffee in what looked like the old town and then wandered down the back streets to find a restaurant for lunch off the main drag and in the shade. We found just what we were looking for and were enjoying a meal of tapas when up comes a man who sets up his keyboard and started blasting out very bad music which meant we couldn't hear to speak to each other. I used to get that a lot when I worked in central Geneva, the guy who wandered round the restaurants playing three bars of Rawhide and then came round with the hat and it drove me mad - every single day! Mind you when Karen said "I wish Richard Clayderman would bugger off" we all cracked up - and maybe he heard because he packed up and left not long after that!

After that we spent an hour wandering round the old town and the cathedral but as it was so hot we were only too glad when we got back down to the harbour to wait for the bus in a shaded café!

Palma cathedral!

Later that evening a young man came in who played soul music so for once I sat and listened as I love soul. He wasn't bad but the heat was a killer so I left around 11.30 pm just to get out of it! The next day was another "do nothing" kind of day until later that evening when the guide came over to me and asked if I spoke Spanish (I can get by, but I'm not fluent), because apparently Irene and M were at the police station and the hotel receptionist didn't speak enough English to explain what had happened. Well it turned out that Irene and M had taken a taxi to Alcúdia and sat down in a restaurant when M decided it was too expensive and got up to leave. At this point I think Irene had had enough and offered to pay for her meal but M was already out the door, so Irene grabbed her purse and ran after her. It was only when she got to the next restaurant that Irene realized she'd left her small shoulder bag with her papers, money and phone at the previous restaurant and went running back to get it, only for it to be gone. The people at the next table said that nobody had been at that table since they left except for the wait staff so it was pretty obvious who had taken it! At this point the owner refused to give Irene the restaurant's phone number and virtually threw her out the door and told the people at the other table to stop talking to them!!!!! The big worry, of course, was did Irene have her passport in that bag as we were leaving the next day, but the hotel receptionist told us that even with Irene's permission she could not go into her room and open the safe, so we just had to pray she had left it in her room (she had, as it turned out)! While I was chatting with our guide the receptionist came over to me and said that a gentleman needed her to go with him to his room for some reason, and she was letting me know that she was going up to room 152 - if you get my drift! To be honest I'd never thought about that kind of thing but she just wanted someone to know where she was in case anything happened. I guess they see it all in hotels, don't they!

Later that evening our guide bought me a drink for helping her out and we ended up having a long chat about this and that - and it came out that her first husband had been extremely violent, one time throwing her through a glass door into the garden and that she would have bled to death if the neighbour hadn't seen her through the kitchen window lying on the back patio!!! Crikey, I wasn't expecting that, but she did send me a text message after she got back to England thanking me for allowing her to open up like that!

The trip back was a bloody nightmare, with my flight ending up being delayed six hours and Easyjet changing the gate number from gate C44, to C62 and back to C39 all while making no announcement of the gate change over the tannoy! So I got back around midnight and threw a load of washing in because of course the plumber was coming at 8 am the next morning to start work!!!! Then I got a call from the chimney sweep, who had tried to set up an appointment while I was in Mallorca, and he asked if he could come in an hour's time too. So at one point I had a man running a vacuum upstairs with another man running a vacuum downstairs - that surely must be a Women's Libber's wet dream!

It was only when I got back that I heard about the earthquake in Morocco and realized that my neighbours had been there at the time. They were in Agadir and said they were in bed on the fourth floor of the hotel when it started swaying like crazy! Nobody was killed in Agadir (most of the victims were in the Atlas mountains and Marrakesh), but one man had a heart attack and died from the fright. I can't even begin to imagine how frightening that must have been!

And finally, last Sunday was our "clean up the neighbourhood" day and we lucked out in that we had good weather all day - only for a torrential downpour to hit right after we'd cleaned up. And now life returns to normal - or as normal as it can be with a plumber and tiler traipsing through the house most days. Still, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs can you!

Oh and get this, tomorrow is my birthday but this morning I had a "happy birthday" text message from the young man that I dated briefly after my husband left. He lives in Berne and the relationship kinda just ran its course but we parted on friendly terms. So today he texts me and we end up chatting off and on all day, It's hard to believe we hadn't spoken in about 14 years and then just picked back up where we left off! How weird is that!