Mallorca (part one)

Well, since we only have classes from 10am till 2pm on Wednesdays and Fridays for now, we decided to go on a vacation last weekend to somewhere warm and close and cheap which ended up equalling the Spanish island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean!!

Our flight left last Saturday morning at 6:55am. In order to get to the airport in time, we had to set our alarms for a 4:30am wake-up. Naturally, we went to bed very early on Friday night.. or not. We actually ended up eating dinner at around 9pm (standard dinner time in Spain) but then having a few people over afterwards.. which then turned into more people coming over.. which then turned into a whole group of people leaving our place at 2am but leaving behind quite a number of empty wine bottles and beer cans.. I'm a poor packer when I'm sober.. it was almost hilarious to discover what I packed while drunk. (read: three pairs of sandals, no skirts, no shampoo, a plan to wear a freshly hand washed pair of capris.. which of course were still wet in the morning)

Needless to say, the 4:30am wakeup call came far too soon and we fumbled around (some of us still drunk) and caught our cab to the airport. As we walked over to the cab, we discovered some rats running around in the streets at night. I’m going to try to pretend that they only come out at night. They were really big, to my memory.

The flight was short, but the pre-amble and post-amble were painful (due to my hangover and lack of sleep). Never before have I wished that a flight was longer.. We revived ourselves with pastries in the airport and then went in search of our hostel. This search took some time as half of us were taken away in a cab, and the other half were turned away by a surly cabbie and told to take a bus (which took 20 minutes, rather than 5). However, we all eventually made it to the hostel and stored our luggage there and went in search of breakfast. We ate breakfast at this little german haven of a breakfast cafe.. we thought it was cute. (more on this later)

We all just wanted to sleep at this point, but since we couldn’t check into the hostel, and since we also wanted to enjoy the island we had come to, we went and napped on the beach! The best of both worlds.

Hung over and/or tired, sleeping on the beach

The hostel was in Playa de Palma (just down the coast from Palma, the biggest city in Mallorca) which is a beach about 4 kilometers long. There is development all along the beach but it is only about 4-5 blocks at it’s deepest point. We were situated about 2 blocks from the beach.

Of course, Arif took many fantastic photos with his high-tech camera and mad-skillz, and you can access his fab fotos by clicking Arif's Photos to the right. But here are some of my faves from that day:

The waves were HUGE!! so we spent an enjoyable afternoon jumping around in them.

We knew we were coming to a resort island, and expected to encounter scads of tourists, but we were suprised at how many German tourists had basically taken over this stretch of beach. Above is pictured only a portion of a section filled with german beer gardens (note the top left corner of the photo). We were confused, as we thought we had suddenly stumbled into germany by accident. The photo dosen't do the place justice, but try to imagine hundreds of germans packed into beer gardens which are blaring german techno. Our little german-only cafe of the morning made a little more sense by this point. Dinner that night was tricky, as none of us really felt like shnitzel.. which was practically all the resteraunts were serving. The beer was good though.