Trink, Trink, Brüderlein, Trink

Why are there so few German bars in Alcúdia? I say few, I'm struggling to think of any other than Epcot. But that's not a German bar; it flies a flag of British convenience. Historically, there were, but since Freddy's Kleine Mühle was pulled down to make way for the perimeter of the Coral de Mar, it's hard to point to one; Cockpit isn't there any longer, is it? Whatever, the non-Spanish or non-Spanish-speaking bar is dominated by the Brits; a last vestige of empire in the sun.

It's not as though you don't get German bars in other places which are almost exclusively German by tourism; Cala Ratjada for instance. And it's not as if there is neither a healthy German population in Alcúdia nor a healthy German tourism market. Take away the faux biergartens, and there are no obvious German kneipes that assault you with the sight of lederhosen, the smell of a bratwurst or a "maß" of pilsner. The Brits may have come, probably, to be the largest tourist group in the highly-diverse Alcudia, but the town is not like the shires of England and the glens of Scotland that is Puerto Pollensa. There you can understand the absence of German bars, as the German tourist numbers are significantly lower, and of course have been advised never to set foot in the place again - if you can recall that German newspaper thing of a few months back. In Puerto Pollensa, you can even find, no doubt for the legions of Neighbours-watching Brits, an alleged Australian hostelry; whatever that is. (By the way, if Dick from Australia is reading this, maybe he can enlighten me; he may even have been in it.)

Even among Spanish-owned bars in Alcúdia, the default foreign style is British (or Irish); the so-called biergartens are really restaurants with the name added. Cut along to Playa de Muro, and it's the same. And yet here, the German tourism market is every bit as strong as the British, if not stronger. What do you find? More than half-a-dozen bars that are or profess to be British/Irish. German bars? Zippo; at least as far I'm aware. Only when you get to Can Picafort, which the Germans more or less colonised, and which they still dominate in terms of tourist numbers, do you begin to find something that smacks vaguely of being German. Yet even so, the more obvious bar display is the British pub.

I find this all quite curious. The Germans are, after all, a prolific beer-drinking nation. One might have expected every corner to house a kneipe or a Hansi's Wurst and Weissbier imbiss stand (now I think of it, there is something like that just before the beach at the top of The Mile, or at least there used to be). But the impression is that the Germans have been deserted in terms of readily-identifiable bars. For other nations, notably the Dutch and the Scandinavians, a British bar is often an attraction, assuming those Dutch or Scandinavians are among the drinking classes; they can consume a prodigious volume of cold drink. The Dutch, it might be added, would probably only enter a German bar, were there one, with a gun to their head. The British bar, though, is quite acceptable to other nationalities (even some Germans); perhaps the default foreign style is right, after all, while the Irish bar is a multinational marketing phenomenon, understood by Germans, Dutch and others.

One might be tempted to say that the Germans more easily accept "Spanishness" than do the British and are less interested in having their own bars. One might be tempted, but I personally wouldn't believe it. Out of season, the situation is even more transparent. There are several British/Irish/British-style bars in the port of Alcúdia, all of which are likely to be open for most if not all the winter. German bars for a similar sort of population? Maybe it's just that Germans don't have much interest in running bars; again I find that hard to believe. Nope, I really don't know the answer; it will remain a mystery unless someone can come up with a good reason as to why there is this absence.

It is doubly mysterious when one considers the hold that Mallorca has over the Germans. Someone here, a politician or tourist authority type, said not so long ago that the British have Mallorca in their genes. If that's the case, the Germans were involved in the Mallorcan big bang that came to form those genes. The island is virtually an annexed state of the Bundesrepublik. In Germany, Mallorca features as a specific item in weather reports; German TV even broadcasts some of its truly appalling schlager-musik shows from Mallorca. But something that also occurs to me is that, unlike for the British, there is no daily newspaper for the Germans on the island. Yet the German population, in Mallorca as a whole, is larger than the British. Another curiosity. Oh well, I shall mull this all over while surveying the products in Puerto Alcúdia's Eroski. There I will see various German sausages. How many British sausages will I see? Precisely none. British bars, but German sausages. Don't understand.

And as a sort of footnote to this, and for all of you from all sorts of countries, there is the altogether more amorphous bar state that is the international bar. To that end, Les tells me that the Vamps karaoke system now has all manner of stuff in all manner of languages and it is going down a storm with the league of nations beating a path to the Calle Astoria. Not sure how many German drinking songs are on the system. When our house proudly got a mono record-player, one of the first records we had was one of such songs; there was also an EP of Swedish folk songs. Strange days.


PUERTO POLLENSA - NOW IT'S THE PARKING
Oh, lordy, lordy, here we go. No sooner pedestrianised, than now it's time to get rid of the parking area on Puerto Pollensa's front line. "It's absurd," says the chap responsible for culture at Pollensa town hall (as quoted in the "Diario"), commenting on the parking's existence. I don't quite know what it's got to do with him, but there you go. The impetus for scrapping all or most of the parking area would be to make way for an increase in the number of moorings. Well maybe these are needed, but one cannot escape the impression that little by little the pedestrianisation scheme is unravelling in terms of all that was planned in support of it. How long has the closure of the parking area been on the publicly unstated agenda I wonder? It may be absurd to have this space devoted to parking, but then one has to ask, given the problems of parking in Puerto Pollensa, where are those cars going to park. And if the original extent of the pedestrianisation does indeed come to pass, that will merely exacerbate the problem of parking in the town. Oh well, cue, no doubt, all manner of debate and angst among the good people of the port.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Steve Miller Band (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIHP9o6X6D8). Today's title - not a quiz question but be prepared for tomorrow's youtube, which will show probably why it's just as well there aren't any German bars.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)