Un foraster no és un agent forestal. Bye Serrano Ham and Sobrasada! Without Mallorca, life won't ever be the same again.

My roommate's mother is in town. I'm not a misanthrope. I swear it. She's a nice lady. She looks like a sun-kissed raisin with a pair of stark, mint green eyes. She reminds me of an elderly version of that Afghan girl on the cover of that National Geographic from 1985.  Sweet. Garrulous. Sincere. Chatty. Kind. Loquacious. Mystical. She talks a lot. What begins as a passing salutation turns into a stop and chat that leaves knots on the bottom of your feet and the back of your knees aching from shuffling around because you want to leave. When she's in town I find myself listening at my bedroom door to make sure I avoid her. She's been here for two weeks already. I have managed to avoid her that entire time. Well today, after I had gone down to the park to throw a few of my things out, I ran into her on the stairs. I was distracted. I didn't see her coming down the steps. I might have been safe had I ducked into the elevator instead of taking the stairs.Who would have thought that being lazy would have its merits. There was nothing I could do. No way for me to retreat. Within moments she spilled all of her anxieties onto the stairwell and proceeded to mop them about with my ears. Her conversations are a flight of ideas. Picture a heavy artillery gun firing Pictionary topics into the sky while this mother snatches them out of the air as the conversation goes on. I think she was tired of being locked in a room with her daughter. I feel bad because the conversation actually cheered me up. I hate being cheered up. She handed me a flashlight in a tunnel. She said, "The George you are now, is going to stay here with his friends. He's not leaving Mallorca, so don't be sad. Your friends won't be lonely because they'll remember the times you spent here together. There's a new chapter. Empty yourself. and now you can go on filling those empty pages with new people, new places, and new words." It was intense. Before I knew it we were about an hour into a conversation while teetering on a narrow stairwell.

The last thing she told me was to be like a dresser. "If you open all the drawers on dresser, it falls over. Make sure you only open the right drawer for the right moment." 

These are a few of the drawers I opened in my time here on this Roqueta in the Mediterranean.  

La Seu, the Cathedral of Palma

Yesterday, I said goodbye to one of my classes. The teacher warned them that I would be leaving and they all drew pictures for me. It was going well, but thinking back I'm sure that they didn't understand that I wasn't coming back next year. That is until one of them asked, "But we'll see you next year, right?" I shook my head. The girl started crying. I looked over at the teacher, thinking she might do something to save me, but she offered nothing. This teacher is usually apt at dealing with the student's and their emotions, but this reaction caught even her off guard. I looked over at the teacher and said, "I don't know what to do." I wasn't going to lie to the little girl. I walked over gave the girl a hug and told her she would be okay. Dealing with emotional outbursts isn't my forte. It's hard to believe that even after 35 years of life I'm still a novice. I think this was the toughest part of my time as nurse.Nurses aren't supposed lie. It's unethical. If a patient asks you if everything is going to be okay you can't tell them, yeah it's all going to be fine, don't worry about that operation where we chop out your liver and switch it out with another one from a dead person, chill dude. My answer was often, it's hard to say. It depends on how the patient responds to treatment. You have to master the art of saying something without meaning anything. There's no definitive answer. Not all patients react the same, BLAH BLAH BLAH. I might be the worst person to come to if you need reassurance.

Two experiences marked my time on the island of Mallorca. The first involved a conversation with a nun. In Palma, I got placed at a Catholic school. I have very little personal experience with nuns or with religion in general other than a few friends who belonged to all sorts of evangelical sects in Texas. I have to confess my ignorance. The other thing to keep in mind is that although I speak Spanish the language is quite different depending on the country and the context. If you don't believe me try asking for an alfajor de Cajeta in Argentina and see what kind of response you get. Back to the story. The nuns ran the school. Their roles in class were limited to religion, but once in a while I'd see one nun with a guitar slung across her back. I remember walking down the hall one day and hearing something that I thought was the Mamas and the Papas and awing when I saw that same nun jamming out in a classroom with a group of students. Well one day, while standing in the break room the head nun, who had pretty much ignored me until that point approached me. She was a plucky nun with a cowboy swagger and eyes like coal. She was in charge. I froze. Thinking that maybe I'd done something wrong. Then I was caught off guard when she said, "Can we count on you to be here tomorrow?" Just so you know, tomorrow was my day off. I didn't want to come in on my day off. Thinking I could weasel out of it I asked her what they were going to do. Her response, was (I'll give this in Spanish) Para el follón. Now those of you who have gone to Spanish 101 know that para el means, for the. She said, "For the____. 

I had never heard the word follón, but I had heard the word follar, which means to screw, and I'm not talking about putting an IKEA table together. The nearest translation to Para el Follón is, for some fuckery. Later on I found out that Follón meant the party, but you can imagine where my mind went. I was horrified. I tried to keep a straight face. I took a cue from the other teachers who didn't seem to think anything of the phrase. It seemed like a pretty normal word. 

The second experience was my first time getting naked at the beach. In Spain you have to get used to nudity. There's no way around it. It's everywhere. Whether it's one of your roommates, the neighbor, or a beach-goer, nudity is everywhere. I learned this in Menorca when I watched a naked, 80 year-old man have a conversation with an eight year-old boy and his topless mother in the spot right next to ours at the beach. The old man sat behind us on the bus back to Mahon. It took us a while to recognize him with his clothes on. I have to admit that I'm a bit of  a prude when it comes to nudity. I'd never gone skinny dipping, and I had no intention of ever doing it. That day was a perfect storm of heat, exertion, and absent mindedness. We fled the city in hurry, and the beach was about an hour cycling followed by a thirty minute hike. Other than a nude couple, there wasn't anybody there. 

Torrent de Pareis

That day, drenched in sweat from hike and bike ride, there was nothing I wanted more than to hop into the water. In the summer the sweltering heat forces you to the coast. Luckily, Mallorca is the sea. A blue so transparent that when you leap into the water you panic momentarily thinking you might plummet to the bottom. You can't help but stare as the sun glistens off of every ripple in the water. It's hypnotic. It was at that moment, while I day dreamed of my first leap into the blue that I realized I had left my swimming trunks on the bed at home. I searched my backpack, I searched everything that we brought, but to no avail. I had resigned myself to dipping my feet at the water's edge, when Laura suggested to me that I swim naked. It seemed nuts! I told her she was crazy. Well I tried to wait it out but the sun had other plans. Eventually I gave in and did it. Now the best part about swimming nude or being nude is that your nakedness gives you a kind of anonymity. Think about the last time you saw a naked person. Did you look at their face? There's something in the brain that simply registers them as naked and forces you to look away. The worst part about swimming naked is that you don't have any clothes on. I went with the flow and when people started to arrive at the beach I felt so anonymous that I didn't care. The next day, when I recounted this to one of the teachers at school she she told me that she had given up on going topless after one of the students in her class saw her at the beach. That was a bit unsettling.    

Olive Trees in Deiá

The Mallorquin's greatest weakness: Jellyfish. It seems like everyone I met had been stung at least once in their childhood and for that reason when you go to the beach the first question a stranger asks is if there were Medusas in the water.(Jellyfish=Medusas) I recall one scorching day in late June. The city of Palma was in the middle of a heat wave and we decided to head out to a beach nearby. We arrived to find that the beach was covered in sunbathing locals, but no one was swimming. We set our things down and stepped up onto the a rocky cliff that projected out over the sea. I prepared myself to jump, but before I could dive in I heard someone shout for me to stop. I turned to see a woman hustling over waving with one arm. I figured there was a shark, man-of-war, or that I was jumping into the only patch of water that was owned by this lady. I stopped myself. She told me that someone had seen a jellyfish in the water. I turned and looked at the crowd of beach goers. Most of them were taking sun, lying there oblivious to the fact that I was about to dive in. They didn't seem to care, but there was a small group that watched me longingly. I imagined that they were waiting to see if I was stubborn enough to jump in. I can't think of anything  worse than going to the beach and not being able to get in. I wasn't about to take the chance. Instead, I joined the group of miserable sunbathers, shared the oppressive heat with them, and waited only to find out later that it was a plastic bag and not a jellyfish. What the hell do I know about jelly fish? If all the Mallorquins were afraid of the animal I figured there was a healthy reason for it. Until that moment my experience with jellyfish was limited to that bit of common knowledge that jellyfish stings made it somehow okay to get a golden shower. 

Campanet Valley

The Mallorquin's greatest strength: In all of my travels I have never met a group of people who were able to enjoy life quite as much as the Mallorquins. It's a European stereotype that the Spanish, in general, have an insatiable thirst for life. They work to live, not live to work, BLAH BLAH BLAH. The Mallorquins however approach everything little thing with authenticity. Take the Pa Amb Oli for instance. Pa Amb Oli literally means, bread and oil. It's Mallorca's culinary claim to fame. It's simple, and to be honest it would have never crossed my mind that bread and olive oil could be meal until I heard it described by a Mallorquin. First you toast a bit of rustic wheat bread. No Wonder bread. The bread here looks like something you'd see a medieval peasant or feudal king tear into at a feast. It's beautiful bread. Serious bread. Then you take a tomato from the garden, slice it in half, and rub the tomato onto the toasted side of the bread. Afterward you drizzle a bit olive oil over the top and garnish with a pinch of Ibizan sea salt. Voila. If you're feeling frisky you can add some Serrano ham, or Mahon cheese, but it's great plain. They usual add a few crushed olives and Fonoll Mari (a pickled herb that's a cross between fennel and seaweed). 

The Mallorquin accent is very particular. 

Muro Pumpkin Festival

I can always pick out a Mallorquin. It's the same thing that happened with Pittsburghers. I could be on the other side of the world and I'd always be able to pick it out. Another thing about the Mallorquin accent is that it is highly contagious. I often find myself speaking English with the Mallorquin intonations.

By far my favorite thing about Mallorca is the elderly, especially the old Mallorquins with their rich accent and sing song sentences. I love to sit in the plaza and watch them shuffle around until they find a seat. Their conversation peppered with idioms completely unknown to the younger generations. I'll miss all of those old people I heard every morning on my walk to school but never met .

Things that I'll miss:
The polite way the elderly say hello on the elevator.
The way the elderly brush you aside at the supermarket so they can bag their groceries.
The way the cashiers at the Mercadona (Supermarket) scan and toss your groceries down the conveyor belt as if you were playing supermarket sweep.
The way the cashiers at the Mercadona expect you to quit bagging to pay them.
The way the cashiers at the Mercadona scan and toss the next person in line's groceries down the conveyor belt onto all of your stuff as if the next person in line were playing supermarket sweep, and if she's elderly she's gonna shove you out of the way, so you better hurry the hell up because grandma's got places to go and people to see, bitch!

Terrace Dining  with Chema and Irene.

Eating on the terrace.
Eating on the terrace in the winter.

Career waiters. I will miss them the most. They're like firefighters. Call them when you need them. Wave them over, they won't get offended. Sign the check in the air, they don't care. Best of all they take their job seriously. They also ignore you. Which is lovely. American servers can be cumbersome. One word of advice, though. When you get to the restaurant, don't lollygag or grab ass around. Take control of the menu, decide, and order. If they come and you tell them you're not ready the wait staff won't be back until you've forgotten what you wanted. They also love the banter, so don't take yourself too serious. If they make fun of you it's because they like you.

We called her Yoko Jamono, Le Swoon!

Ham. Spanish ham is the best, so much so, in fact, that the first thing I bought when I moved to Spain was a giant ham leg. There was a massive cardboard box in the middle of the grocery store with these ham legs tossed inside. Tell your congressman, your senator, your mayor: IMPORT HAM NOW!! Dying with a slice of Spanish ham in your mouth wouldn't be such a bad way to die.

The Serra Tramuntana.
The almond trees blossom in February.
The twisted olive trees were my favorite; their knots bulged out from the trunk like wind beaten trolls. Dali couldn't of dreamed such a landscape.

Brunch sucks Vermouth is king!

During lent they cut one of  Grandma's legs off 

every week until Easter.

I'll miss my students and especially their honesty. An example of this manifested itself over the winter. I have to say that I never pay much attention to how often I wear certain clothes. Whether I wore something last week isn't something that crosses my mind, in the morning. The kids do, however, notice these things. I hadn't noticed that I had been wearing the same flannel shirt every Tuesday for three weeks.That day when the teacher stepped out of the classroom for a second one of the students raised her hand and asked me, "Why do you always wear the same clothes to school?" The kid asked me in Spanish. Another responded, "It's because he doesn't have any." I found myself in a dilemma, because the students weren't supposed to know that I understood or spoke Spanish. I knew exactly what they had asked and it took everything in me not to laugh. The entire thing culminated when the teacher returned and the kids asked him the same question. He avoided answering the question. He made the same uncomfortable face to the kid that my dad made to me when I asked him what a condom was. Then the teacher began to lecture them on rude behavior, while he handed out jars of tempura paints. The words stumbled out of his mouth as he avoided addressing the fact that I had indeed been wearing the same shirt every Tuesday for three weeks.

La Rosa

To the teachers. I’ve got that anxious ache in my stomach. Like it's trying to run away without me. It could be the coffee I just drank. That could be the reason, but I’m sure it’s not. I'm anxious for the next step. Anxious to say goodbye. I know I'm going to miss this place. I'll be afraid to come back because things might not be same. The truth is that we won’t be the same people that we were these past years, because we'll grow and change.I wish I could make everything stop until I came back. My friends would stay in the exact same spot. Their children wouldn’t grow, their lives wouldn’t go on until I came back and took my same old place at the table. 

When you’re traveling all you know is change. Keep your feet moving. Don’t stop, don’t stumble, step, step, step. Living from one memory to the next. Longing for the place I was just at. This is the first time that I wanted to stay. It’s as if I were leaving home. 

I recall the nervous look on all the teacher's faces in the weeks leading up to my departure. "Don't you want to stay?" They'd ask me. "Isn't it going to be hard to leave?" They'd say. Some even went as far as to tell me, "You're practically Mallorquin you can't leave, the island won't let you."

"What will you miss the most?" Was the most common question. It was the one that was most difficult to answer.
The best answer I can think of was, "the quality of life." There's something about being able to walk to work that makes your life better. Not to mention the fact that your vegetable shop owner is a person who not only takes pride in arranging the fruit into meticulous pyramids, but even offers conversation and political opinion free of charge. Better yet, if you disagree you can even tell him or her that they're nuts. They'll simply laugh it off. People here, at least for the time being, are still people. Not the automatons with their heads craned over their phones, I have come to see everywhere else. Their vacant stares illuminated by the periwinkle glow from off of their retina screens. Not that I'm any better. I too have a phone. My stare is just as vacant. All I'm saying is that it was nice to remember that I was once a person, too.

Things I won't miss:

Drunk, beet red tourists, stumbling around the city. 

Swing, and its ubiquitous nature.

To travel is to lose countries. To constantly be someone else. That is what Pessoa said. I feel like I always understood the second phrase better than the first. When you're traveling there is nothing in the other culture to pin you to the person you were back home. You can play whatever role you want. Strangers take you as you are or for who they think you might be. The first phrase is a bit more difficult to understand. It's common knowledge that the more you do something the easier doing said thing becomes. Practice makes perfect: shooting baskets, writing sentences, inserting IVs, teaching English. I'd say the maxim is true about everything except saying good bye. It only ever gets harder. I can't seem to lie to myself about the possibility of never seeing them again. I hope I'm wrong. I'll miss Mallorca. Adeu.  

Adeu Mallorca, Fins després.