Mallorca

Let me say something about the Mallorcan hospitality: there is none. As soon as a traded the boat for the bus to Palma, I got confronted with this lovely fact. The bus driver was not shy about expressing the fact that he did not like me paying with a 20 euro bill. With a lot of Goder! this and Puta! that, he pointed to the poster the size of a zigzag, printed out by an empty matrix printer inside of the bus, stating the rule! My excuses and explaining that it was my first time taking a bus on Mallorca left him cold. So I pocketed my 20 and sat down. Similar with the reception lady of the hotel in Palma, she simply shrugged her shoulders after she did not receive my reservation which I had made via http://www.booking.com/ . A reservation nr was worthless…

When I arrived at my lovely 3 star hotel Torre in El Arenal I discovered why the hospitality was lacking. It is the Mc Donald’s Mecca of the tourist industry! Now read carefully for I shall only write this once: if you consider yourself to have so much as half a brain cell, you want to stay well clear of Arenal, or the whole of Mallorca for that matter, just to be safe really. Unless you fancy eating what you eat at home, speaking the language you speak at home, being surrounded by the same neighbouring cultures (and luckily they all proudly show their nation somehow) while getting extremely drunk and while being profited by the tourist industry with the lowest of standards. The hotel was as sturdy as a carton box I think. During the nights I had to snap on the light every ten minutes to convince myself there was no one sleeping next to me, snoring the night away. I must not complain, for I had a window in my bathroom. Not being able to close the window because of the flush build between it, did not bother me as much as the view, the neighbour’s bathroom! Very amusing if you are located next to a hot lesbian couple I suppose, but I am afraid they don’t venture anywhere near dubious places like that.

Then Transavia topped it off by wanting to make me pay 24 euros for 4 kilos too much luggage while checking in for Amsterdam. 24 euros for 4 kilos? You’d have to be lugging around solid gold for it to be profitable to cough up the money. Maybe the extra stars at the hotel where because of balance scales at one’s disposal, and I was withheld that information. I sure wasn’t going to pay 24 euros for some worn down dirty underwear. So I did them one up, I got out a pair of shoes and a sweater. You can imagine this was quite a scene, for my duffel was packed to the max with the heavy apparel at the bottom. Very dirty clothing and chorizo sausages spread over the airport floor. I could see some people slam their forehead, ‘Why had they never thought of this themselves’. . The flight was delayed by the way… 2.5 hours!

Luckily ‘we are still free to question all rules, and apply logic!’