Mi día de fiesta hasta ahora

I´m only here three days or so and yet it feels like a week. That´s a mixed blessing. I really want to get on with my family, I really don´t want to think I can´t be in the same room as one of my parents. But honestly, they´re driving me mental.

Y´see, I came here for a holiday. A holiday shouldn´t really involve walking for nearly two hours to a “nearby” city. Especially when it´s 30-something degrees out here. And yet I´ve done this yesterday and today. Maybe it´s good for you, but I sure don´t like it.

Well, maybe I would. I´ve got this feeling I´d love it here if I had different company. I want to wake up in a bed, instead of a couch. I want to decide for myself what to do. I hate this thing of them always wanting to go somewhere or do something. Isn´t that what we try and get away from for two weeks?

So. I´ll try and compose myself now and tell you all a little about what Menorca is like. I was here ten years ago, but perhaps it was too much to expect of me as a wide-eyed 11 year old to notice that Menorca is actually Catalan. I only realised this while reading up on the place in a bookshop a few weeks ago. So they speak a different language here and the culture´s different too. Catalans are said to be more hard-working, more industrious, more cultured than Spanish people. I´d believe that; you´re more likely to see people pick things up here and they´re by far the nicest people I´ve met in all the times I´ve been to Spain. The people in the south, the Costa del Sol, are blatantly disgusted with you and hardly disguise this. But Catalans seem far more genuine.

But the heat here is unreal. Thirty degrees is all very well in the Canaries, but at least there you have a nice Atlantic breeze. In the Baelarics, you have nothing. Just the sun roaring down on you with such blanket intensity you just have to get used to it. There´s no avoiding it, bar hiding in one of the many boutiques around the place. But even then they start looking at you to buy something and the last thing I need is another floral dress……

Menorca means the little one. And being so small, it´s also very quiet. Everything closes down early enough. No-one seems to pushed to do anything. Which is why all this walking is doing my head in. I´m getting a bus. And as for my car rental idea, well they only seem to rent to 21 year olds in the capital, Mahón. Which is Mao in Catalan, by the way. And right now, I´m in the old capital – Ciutadella. Which is a fascinating big old Spanish town with a Gothic cathedral made from the ruins of a mosque. Apparently they used the minaret as a bell tower. It gets more fascinating after that, but I´ll leave that for another entry. Right now, I have to head across the square, buy a newspaper and get a Chicken Whopper meal in Burger King with beer instead of Sprite.

Damn I love Spain.

j