The Mallorca Weekend

Hey, how'ya doin'? We're back from our little weekend of mayhem in Mallorca, Spain, home of the sobrassada, the ensaïmada, the empanada and a lot of other yummy things that end in -ada. I'll try to sum up the weekend in as few words as possible, but given my natural talent for verbal diarrhea I can already see myself failing miserably. But here's my try at it anyway:

Friday, Nov 21:

03.00: Wake-up call. Oh, no, fucking hell, it's much too early and much too cold to stand up. Outside it's fucking snowing (a lot!), and I've gone to bed just three hours ago, after getting my shit in a much-too-small suitcase and with the ears still ringing after last night's rehearsal. I couldn't find my eyes to put my contact lenses even if I tried hard. The fuckers just won't open, so I decide to step out to the outside world as a bespectacled-wannabe-rocker. Great. Our plane leaves at 06.00 from TXL, so there's no other choice. Which kind of idiot could book flights at such an intempestive time? Oh, hold, I did it, bugger.

04.10: Jorge arrives and then we leave to pick up Tobi at home, where he has a special encounter with a neighbour who was doing something at the door his girlfriend would not be so happy to know about. The masculine code of discretion prevents any of us of telling more...


05.00: We meet Timo at the terminal and after not checking our precious instruments (the guitars, I mean) we crawl to the nearest bar and I order what's probably the tiniest coffee I've ever seen with the driest croissant ever. Two world records in just one tray. Well, three if you count the record price paid.

06.00: We board the plane and everyone bar me directly falls asleep. I envy people who can sleep in a plane, I'd love to shake them so they are as bloody awake and tired as me, but I'm a good boy and don't. So I produce the book I've brought this time, which is Fight Club, by Chuck Palahmiuk. Which by the way starts with the narrator describing horrible plane crashes and the like. Grrrreat stuff to be reading while your ass is hanging somewhere over France in a flying sausage.

08.40: We land at Palma de Mallorca and we find Bernat and his girlfriend Ana waiting for us outside. Bernat is the guitarist in Alterego, the band we're playing both gigs and the one who started all this crazy idea of this little band going to Mallorca to play there. Great guy and great guitar player. He's taken the day off at the office to drive us around the island and show us around a bit.
09.30: Crammed into a car with all our guitars and shit we drive to Palma to have breakfast and take a look around the city. After a while we find a way cool bar in the old side of town serving the best bocadillos ever, which, hungry musicians as we are, is the best that can happen at the time. It's sunny here, blue skies and all, and though we're in November, we've got quite mild temperature during the day. Coming from the cold we're so grateful to the weather gods...

11.00: We take a stroll through the center and I'm amazed about how clean and tidy everything here is, coming from Berlin and its dog shit all around it's a nice change. You can even look up to the nice modernistic buildings and not just to the pavement so as not to treat on a dog mine. Walking through the narrow streets we find a lot of cool shops with sausages hanging like, well, sausages, and Tobi takes the chance to buy some parfume to mascarade his bodily odours after drumming and tries to invite a nice shopkeeper to the gig tonight. Too bad he has no fucking idea where we are playing. Flirt cancelled, abort mission, meec!!

12.30: Still taking a stroll, all of us start noticing the lack of sleep and decide to sit somewhere and have a cold beer. Or two, or more multiples of one. Just below the cathedral we find a nice terrace to relax and order those beers, while our friends in Berlin text us about how fucking heavy it's snowing right now there. Ah, it's such a great feeling knowing someone else is freezing their ass off while we're sitting here in a T-shirt enjoying the warmth of the sun and doing nothing...

14.00: We meet with Ana again to lunch at probably the best Italian restaurant in town (it can't get any better, really), decorated with famous mafiosi names and the like. The pasta is superb and the waitress sexy. What more can you need? Timo is so tired he's falling asleep over his whateveroni, fucking funny espcially when he's woken by a waiter asking for dessert. A priceless face, I must say.

15.30: We all go back in the car and drive to Manacor, where we're are staying at Bernat's house. It's a 45 m inute drive that some of us (no names) use to take a look at the inner side of their eyelids. Too bad there's a camera around...

16.20: We arrive at Bernat's place only to discover it's a fucking amazing piece of house which overlooks the sea. The lucky bastard. A positive contrast to last time's pad in Uelzen... Tobi falls in love with one of the cats this time. Asked about how he felt about it, the cat decided not to comment. The tiredness finally takes over us and we take a nap until the evening... God, this bed feels sooo good, mmm...

20.00: After waking up and taking a shower, I remember I still have to change the strings on the Les Paul. Bollocks! I hate to do it, but safety comes first... Tobi doesn't have to change any strings so he uses the time to convince the cat that theirs can be a very stable relationship. The cat still thinks otherwise.

20.45: We drive over to Alterego's rehearsal place and finally meet the other band members, Luis, Llorenç and Manolo. All of them are funny as hell, but Manolo (the singer) definitely wins the contest by far. I'm telling Tobi & Timo all the time it's such a pity they cannot understand him, they would be rolling on the floor laughing as Jorge and myself are.

21.15: We drive back to Palma and load in the gear into the club. Festus Place it's called. They have rock gigs on the weekends until 2 in the morning, and then disco with Nigerian music. That's what I call maximizing resources. It's a club in Cala Major, one of the more touristic sides of Palma, and Timo swears he was staying here 10 years ago (yes, yes, I remember this, I was here!) but as he says this almost once every 5 minutes we don't take him very seriously. I mean, we normally don't either, but that's another story.

23.40: Between loading in, setting up all the shit and briefly soundchecking it's almost showtime. We have exactly 20 minutes to go and we still haven't had dinner, for fuck's sake, we're hungry musicians, don't mess with us! The only available option is a döner kebap restaurant right on the other side of the street. I can't fucking believe it. We fly all the way from Berlin to Spain and end up eating a fu-cking dö-ner ke-bap. Though, it was quite tasty and hot as hell. The best for screwing up your voice before a show.

00.00: Showtime! Alterego take the (tiny) stage and rocks the shit out of us for 40 minutes. Llorenç the bass player is playing outside the stage most of the time, he reminds me of Flea, always jumping here and there and making funny faces. Then later we go onstage and treat the Palma audience to a mixture of loud rock and louder roll. And they seem to like it, although the Nigerian owner is looking rather unamused by the whole loud rock stuff. His face clearly says he prefers the sounds of Bob Marley to ours... can't blame him, really.

02.00: After we're finished (and huddle all in the even tinier backstage) it's time for a few beers. Well, at least the ones that Manolo has left... which can be clearly noticed when it's time to load in all the gear again and we all start horsing around, taking silly pictures and goofingly laughing. Manolo even takes the chance to promote our latest record in the worst possible way, hehe.

03.30: After 24 hours awake, the tiredness finally catches us on the way back home and some of us (especially T__o) use the 45 minute car ride to rehearse some new snoring techniques, which is only interrupted by a police control we all pass with flying colours, ehem. And then it's off to never never land...

Saturday, Nov 22:

12.00: I wake up friggin' late, and while trying to control my hair, Tobi tells me he's already been down to the beach. Tourists... Bernat has brought some delicious breakfast that we all devour while chilling out in the terrace and enjoying the sun. We hear it's still snowing in Berlin, which makes us feel even better.

14.00: We all drive down to Manacor and meet Llorenç at Ca'n March, a restaurant that serves probably the best paella I've ever had, and I've had quite a few, believe me. Superb local red wine and tasty food. And plenty of it, and I mean plenty. A fucking lot of food we cannot stop eating even though we're so full by now that it almost reaches the puking point. But simply amazing. After that the only thing a sound person would do is go to bed again and take a long siesta. And that's exactly what we do. You are not really able to do something else at the moment...

19.00: Waking up again. Twice the same day, funny feeling. We're off to Artà tonight, a small village in the middle of the island where we're playing. We arrive there and are amazed at the veue, an old train station refurbished as a pub with a stage at one end and an impressive wall of CDs behind the bar. During soundcheck, we take the chance to play darts and do all the typical stuff you do at a pub, with disastrous results...

22.00: The ritual before the show: find food! Sometimes I feel like a caveman tracking down a mammooth on theses gig days. You finish checking and the you have this slot of time to find a place to eat, rush the food into your stomach and be back in the venue on time. We find a bar in the town serving tasty typical Majorcan tapas (and with a full-blast TV with football, ah, it's great to be back home in Spain) and a waitress just as tasty as the food itself. Tobi, normally a guy unimpressed by women (ehem), falls in love just once again. As he does about 2-3 times a day, even with cats if no woman is around.

23.30: Showtime again! After a really powerful permormance from Alterego (Bernat decided to bring out his Les Paul too, not wanting to be the only non-Les Paul player in the two bands), the bar is set quite high. We do our best, we feel more at ease tonight, less tired probably, which makes it a better show than the night before, energetic as hell. And most important, we're having a lot of fun onstage.

01.30: Around half past late after the gig, and fueled by large amounts of beer, the Alterego guys and us celebrate the end of the tour (!) by taking part at an impromptu photo session backstage where nipples and bums start flashing out as a legacy to the future generations... Loading in of the gear becomes a Chaplin movie, with little musicians falling down and standing up again and bumping into each other and all that. Still, we arrive safely back home. Don't ask me how, I can't remember clearly.


Sunday, Nov 23:

10.00: We wake up, pack all our shit and say goodbye to Bernat and Anna, who have been really nice to us, letting us stay at their home, eat their food, use their beds and rape their cat. We're very grateful for all they've done to make us feel at home. Gracias.

12.00: Bollocks, we have to take a plane back home...

Phrase of the weekend: ¡De puta madre!