Sunday, March 25, 2007

Rains And Boats And Cranes


And so the crappy weather meant that the cuttlefish and boat affairs in Puerto Alcudia were not the success of last year. There were people around, quite a lot in fact, but the terraces were not thronged - too cold and too much of a threat of rain. Still, I got a tasty tapa of sepia in a tangy sauce at La Recoleta; very nice it was, too.

It wasn’t as though there weren’t folk on the terraces. Hardy groups of Germans, who will sit through a gale and plagues of locusts to ensure they are fed at the correct time, were to be noted, as they were - in some abundance - earlier in the day at Cafe Paris’s brunchtime music Sunday. Paris, Can Picafort that is. Not Paris, Paris or Paris, Texas. It is quite marked just how German Can Pic is. And being towards midday, the cry is “Mahlzeit”, one of the German language’s odder utterings, Mahlzeit being a greeting used at mealtimes. Think about it. In England all these folk wandering about at midday shouting “meal time”.


At this time of the year, Easter coming up, the first real flocks of tourists arriving, you would think that all the work that needs to be done would be through. Not a bit of it. As I said at the same time last year, there is a theory that much of the building work that occurs at this time is done purely to prove to people that something is being done (there being fewer folk around earlier in the winter to impress). Consequently, you can turn any corner and be likely to encounter some fucking crane parked in the middle of the road and a couple of weasly workers in luminous jackets who have a communication breakdown in the synchronisation of their stop-go signs.

Amidst all this work, there may though be some semblance of common sense. By the Magic Roundabout I now notice that a red track has been painted to direct cyclists off of the Carretera and onto the side road that runs parallel. Now this might just be a good idea, although it would make for dangerous times ahead for pedestrians. Watch this space.

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