Saturday night at the movies, who cares what picture you see? I do.

***Started writing this yesterday***

I've been sat here in my cave drinking out of one of the obolisk-like water bottles that everyone has here. They hold 8 litres and as such are unweildly to carry, I'm often a bit freaked out when I see really old women carrying them down the street. Seriously though, it just seems like a highly inefficient way of dispensing drinking water to people. I've been here a week and I'm about to start my third bottle which, when you add it up for everyone in the country, must take a HUGE amount of plastic.

Sorry, I don't know why I've started this post with talk of water distribution. I'll move on.
So yesterday I ventured out to the small town of Soller on the super-old, super-touristy train after getting up far too late... something that caused me problems later. I'm still getting used how time is treated differently here, on the one hand everyone eats, sleeps and goes out much later... but on the other shops shut early and Sunday's and even Saturday afternoons have a 28 Days Later vibe.
Anyway, I had a little look around the recently open, and recently flooded, Palma metro system. I'm unsure exactly where it goes to but the metro/train station is great. Check out the cafe in the photo... jesus, you don't get that sort of thing in 'The Lemon Tree' or whatever it is Network Rail are calling the horrendous excuse for a cafe nowadays.
I bought my ticket (in Spanish) and pushed my way past the horders of horrible German and English tourists and got onto the old train. I felt like such a disappointment to be giving in to my tourist urges and quickly got frustrated by the confused looks on everyone's faces and inibility to understand simple signs written in every language known to Mallorca (Spanish, Catalan, English and German).
As you can see, it's an odd looking thing, the same one that meanders noisily past my bedroom window once an hour. Apparently it's one of the thinnest trains in the world, or something like that, I donno, it was a totally unimpressive factoid so I don't really remember the details.
It was a super noisy bugger though, so much so that I HAD to record it. I don't think there are many trains in the developed world that sound quite as delapidated and life threatening.

After it passed my house and through some estates it bursts out into olive groves with the moutains in the distance (pictured). Through a bunch of tunnels with have the double whammy of being completely pitch black for a good while as the train lights come on after a massive delay and EXTRA noisy as the sound of metal on metal bounces on the hard stone. There was some amazing looking villas and outposts on the way too... although I figure they'd feel somewhat 'The Shining' if you spent too long there.
As you can probably tell, albeit via the use of bad camera skills and Nokia's answer to an all-in-one bag of crap, the view is amazing. And after 40 minutes you get your first sighting of the town, that's totally surrounded by huge mountains. I couldn't believe it, totally beautiful. I don't know how this entry is going to pan out formatting wise with it's APPALLING control over this stuff, but you can see the photo I took looking down over the town on the way back.

*continued writing today*

Did my usual meandering in no particular direction, trying to avoid the majority of (mostly German) tourists until I realised I was miles away and walking in the wrong direction. I wanted to head to the port which was apparently 2 miles away but due to the previously mentioned lack of time I only had a couple of hours to make it there and back.

I navigated my way to town limits and found I only had an hour left and it was in fact another FOUR miles. So I admitted defeat and trapsed back. The problem being that the last train was at six and I really wanted to watch the England match... also at six.

Took the train back with a Russian girl staring at me the whole time. Apon re-arrival in Palma I legged it around town trying to find anywhere that looked remotely English and sports-bar-esque. Not much luck. I finally found this Irish bar which was filled with, surprisingly quiet, people in England shirts. Caught the last 20 minutes...

I was supposed to be meeting up with a Swedish guy (there's lots of Swedes in Palma) immediately after but had to take my shit back home so got a taxi to the Placa del Torros, the first time I'd seen it close up. It's actually a pretty impressive building and I can sometimes hear the sound of the announcer from my room as it echoes down the streets like a Muslim call to prayer.
Took ANOTHER taxi back into town, thanks to the rudest taxi driver in Spain, to a street called Plaza Gomila... which as it turns out is pretty dodgy and full to the brim with sex shops and drug dealers. Get to this Swedish bar called Nickes where I'm confronted with a sea of blonde hair that stretches across the room to the low quality projector screen displaying the Sweden match via Chinese satalitte. Drank a few beers whilst Andreas ate some form of meat ball, chatting away about random nonsense and gossip from my new work.
There's something strange about being an English guy in a Swedish bar on a Spainish island watching Chinese television... how very multicultural.

We then waltzed down to Santa Catalina, the place where my alleged new flat is located... although it looks as thought that's not going to happen anymore. In we go to the infamous Hogan's, an Irish bar I'd heard much about that the composer plays at twice a week. Rather disappointingly it's not as packed as the legends foretold. More drinking, more chatting.

The band start at midnight and are pretty impressive, it's all covers and some are slightly altered versions but the composer (who sings on a few songs) has a great voice and the guitarist is shockingly good. It's strange seeing the composer being swooned over by teenage girls... from my point of view he's just Andres (not to be confused with Andreas) from work, but to the people in Hogan's he's a local celebrity. Very funny.

They play until about 3:30am and we head off to a bar/club called the Culture Club. A name I'd like to contest as being somewhat inaccurate in that it's essentially a small dark room filled with people listening to late nineties rock. It was hardly a book club. The music was too loud, the people we were supposed to meet didn't turn up and there was far too many people so we only stayed for a few minutes before running down the road after what was to be my first bus experience. I don't think I'm going to count it though, as by this time I was too drunk to remember much.
We then head closer to town and find out something 'bad' happened to someone, I donno, it's all a bit of a blur and all I know is that we ended up playing pool (badly) in some bar. It's quite odd to walk into a place at 6 in the morning and for it to be filled with people and the bar being open.
I drunkenly ran home again, ringing up my girlfriend and talking utter nonsense for another hour or so. Jesus, I could barely talk and apparently interupted her with my attention deficit, chicken-in-a-basket style banter insessantly. God knows how I managed to install skype in that state.

Sunday was a write-off. I woke up at 3:30, hid in my cave and got depressed. Not much to it really. Just gave myself a backache by watching too much Lost. Standard post-drinking fare.
So today wasn't that much better due to the continuing hangover and the fact that I had to be up super early to go to the bank BEFORE work. This involved a walk down to Placa de Espanya (I think it's called) to meet a chap called Junior who would set up a bank account for me. I really wasn't in the mood to be attempting Spanish today (this is the problem with relocating, you can't have a day off) but luckily he was really good about it and I was shortly in a taxi going to work only 30 mins later than usual.

Today was pretty good from a work point of view. Finished some more movies and got good feedback. Annoyingly the estate agents are being a pain in the ass again and want me to send them another set of keys and keycard... despite telling me they only needed two. So I'll have to get up early and go to the post office, then get a taxi to work just because they're idiots. They also tried to screw me over for money by getting a pro-cleaner in... which i declined and also had a moan about... which they haven't responded to. I hate them. Also... I think the woman with the man voice is dyslexic which is why she didn't like emailing me. I would see that as some sort of vulgar victory if I wasn't slightly dyslexic myself.

Walked back from work again. Today's lessons: Restaurants, Shopping and General Time. I'm really starting to enjoy it now. I was reading yesterday how learning a language is the best way to exercise your brain and develop increased concentration, memory retention and mental dexterity... and I'm starting to believe it. I'm starting to feel a lot more switched on and focused. I know you really need a 'reason' to learn a language, but I cannot recommend it enough for so many reasons.

Anyway, current thoughts about everything... well, I'm starting to feel like I will never be accepted as a local here. I don't think the people here want to know foreigners, which I can understand as it's such a tourist hot spot. Other ex-pats have told me this so I know it's not just my lack of language skills.

Anyway, I should stop writing, this is far too long. It was a real pain in the ass setting up those photos too... so much so that I'm not going to spell check or re-read this as the formatting is bound to screw up again...

R