Ladies and gentlemen - both, awsome and awful news have to be announced. Since somehow - and I can barely think of a good reason for that - one month has passed without a new note in here, there has consequently been a lot going on in the recent five weeks. First, and without any doubt most tragically, Jens has left this wonderful island of chilling, relaxing, free-sex and not-at-all-free but marvelous drinks about two weeks ago. Obviously he considered it more worth his while to spend the colder months of the year in sunny Germany to escape the ludacrious party-machinery that has kept us from real-life-issues for so long. Probably his brand-new girlfriend has given him a little too much excitement so that he really had to slow down a little in order not to suffer from severe testicle-bruises promptly. Ah, what the hell, I guess I’ll never quite understand why he left me here all alone.

Anyhow, recent weeks have also been pretty exciting from my point of view. There has been a neat little university course called “International Trade Law” that only made me work 3 or 4 hundred hours a week to finish the first half of our Memoranda. So I gotta say that I’m not the least bit of disappointed to spend the following three weeks in cosy Austria. Of course I will miss the nice evenings at home were I get beaten up by my room-mate Matjaz the fiftieth time 7:1 in Fifa-Soccer after freezing my butt off due to a lack of heating in our flat. But divine inspiration tells me I’m going to be able to handle the withdrawal-syndroms for a couple of weeks.

Furthermore our efforts in kicking spanish-asses on the soccer field have continued and - outstandingly - have been heard by the big soccer-god himself. The last two weeks we easily managed to teach the locals quite some lessons! Even though partying has not stopped yet! Wise Time-Management seems to be the key element.

But besides all these funny incidents that have shaped our poor lives so flowery somehow Erasmus-people grew less and less over the last few weeks. Obviously everybody finally has settled down a little and tries to focus a bit on university-issues. So somehow - even though partying has not completely stopped of course - things seem a bit more quiet around here. To be honest: I’m just saying that because I can’t remember what crazy freaking stuff happened over all last month since I’m already back in Austria for over a week by now!

On December 15th I started my journey by visiting Andi in Dublin. Flo was also coming, so we were expecting quite some entertainment as we were about to turn the Irish capital to an abandoned waste-land by scaring off all the students at Shanowen Square. Furthermore we had to celebrate Andi’s twentythird birthday (a few days in advance) to make sure he doesn’t get away without paying one or two drinks at his fiest. Birthday-boy and I embarked on the next adventurous ride as we travelled back to Vienna via Frankfurt and Bratislava on December 18th. We left Dublin at six in the morning and had to wait modest 10 hours for our connecting flight to Bratislava at Frankfurt Hahn. Since the ineffably big airport and international hub Frankfurt-Hahn is located just 120km east of Frankfurt itself it seemed quite obvious that we had to pay this financial metropolis a visit. Sadly all the lockers to leave the luggage at the airport were occupied - what seems pretty impossible regarding that the whole airport decrees over 14 lockers!! So we decided not to take the one-and-a-half-hour-bus-ride to Frankfurt but rented a car instead to have some place to put our suitcases. Needless to say we enjoyed the day-trip to the city, wandering around the Old Town, having lunch and cruising through the Martinstal. Honestly I did not foresee that we would need to take the ferry over the Rhein to come back to Frankfurt-Hahn in time, but things like that are the whipped cream on my caffee-latte of life.

Back in Austria most things went quite normal. I met some old pals, had a beer or two with Cruz and Joschi, played soccer against my not yet retired geography-teacher Robert and his cumpañeros and left the city to go to Waldviertel over Christmas. It was nice to see the family again and to slow down a little again, though I have to admit that it was not easy all of the time. I guess once you’ve really grown accustomed to independence and “freedom” it’s never going to be easy to come back any more. Odd…

Right now I’m sitting in my fairly comfortable room in my parent’s appartment in Vienna and enjoy to have a little me-time at a cosy me-space! I just came back from yesterday’s party-ride through the city on which Andi and I unsettled the very nice Tanzcafé Jenseits and the Café Eurpopa before getting a cab, going to Würstel-Leo again and having a great brunch today in the early afternoon. Over new-year’s eve I’m going to be in Graz, I guess. But right now I don’t have any clue… so all this will have to make due for now…

Nobody would have imagined the shocking end of our last soccer-match at the UIB. Since we’re playing every friday to show the spanish how ERASMUS-students are able to win even though they were partying the whole night before week after week, we found ourselves in quite some trouble, facing a 0:4 defeat dawning at the horizon. Obviously our previous victories had spoiled us, so suddenly we really faced some difficulties.
Rumour has it, the final 2:6 score resulted out of the sudden inability of the team’s most stout runner - who happened to be myself - to cover the distance from center line to the opponents goal without fainting at least twice. As it appears obvious, to go running three times a week without cutting down on smoking doesn’t lead nowhere.

Back at the cabin, right after I awoke from my last collapse, I started to reconceive other reasons for this aching defeat. Of course - there’s been a lot of work at university during the last week, which made me stay in our newly obtained seminar-room to work for the international trade law class even on my days off. Then I remembered the slovenian guests who stayed at our appartment during these days and continuously partied with Bojan and Matjaz throughout the nights and days. Since I used to fade out every evening around one a. m. this couldn’t have influenced my performance like that.

And - furthermore - there was yesterday’s jovial evening… eventually we decided to go out for a beer again since girls happened to drink for free at a bar called “Agua” every thursday night. Starting off with a steady round of San Miguel we continuously advanced to Guiness, skipped the fifth round and went on with Tequila right away. Around one o’clock in the morning I found myself babbeling over the good and the bad sides of life with Valentina and confidently decided to pay a visit to “Bluesville” despite having lectures the next day at 8.30. I ran into some Austrians there who had encountered two South-Africans (the whitest faces I had ever seen) who now wanted to find out if we could take on their drinking-habits. Luckily Jens managed to drag me out of that bar and gave me a ride home somewhen in the early morning.

I skipped classes that day and managed to be at the pitch exactly five minutes before the match started then.
But anyway… in the end, neither of these thoughts was helping me to find an excuse for my bad game today… whatever.

Later on, Jens had to carry me to his car once again and providently took me to his place for having dinner together with his flat mates. This delicate self-indulgence seemed to bring life back to my branded body, powering me up to attend the Boteillón Gines was giving at Paseo Maritimo. Some quality Whiskey and a bottle of Coke assured us a wonderful night at the port, meeting most of the ERASMUS community and the previously named acquaintances as well as some new people. I left this hilarious fiesta at around threeish to be ready for our SRI-excursion to the mountains the next day at 7 a.m.

Since I was well aware of my best friend “Insomnia” from the first couple of weeks of my stay, I was glad not to wake up alone in the morning. Even though it was still dark outside - and the thermometer showed Alaska-like 15 degrees outside - I hopped on the bus to meet our tour-group at Placa d’España to leave for Sollér. Gines obviously did not sleep much either, so we decided not to talk much that day. Instead we just enjoyed the wonderful topography of the northern part of the island while taking a trip from Deijá back to Sollér over the mountains. I won’t go on tattling now and just let the pictures speak for themselves…

As it appears obvious I haven’t found the time-notion-ratio to write a new blog entry for the last couple of weeks. This - of course - doesn’t mean, that there was nothing to write about. In fact, as you can perfectly experience watching the photos in the gallery, people have made quite some noise during October. We’ve still been partying a lot, slowly starting to think about university-issues, getting to know each other (the one or the other way) and trying to figure out how to arrange the needs to go out sundays, tuesdays, wednesdays, fridays and saturdays without looking like Johnny Krueger’s evil step-brother the next morning at university.

Thank gods teachers are quite sympathetic when it comes to the apparent fact, that ERASMUS students definitely need special treatment regarding the courses and certainly the grading! Since some of us didn’t manage to go to class one or the other week most of them provided us with just enough additional information to handle the necessary catching-up. Others evidently didn’t even really see the need to consider our slight disadvantage in language-terms and asked the exact same amount and quality of our work as they did from the native-spanish-speaking students. In that case it proved quite funny to screw one homework after another while not being afraid of asking the always occuring most basic questions while our class-mates were thinking about some stiff details, just holding back their aghast faces and hilarious laughter about our exiguous inadequacy in following the lectures.

Nevertheless most of us managed to stay on the courses, prudentially playing their ERASMUS-Bonus-Card in the very right moments. But - as some of you might be shocked by that fact - a year abroad is not all about studying and being at the university! Naturally we also enjoyed the never-ending mediterranean summer at the numerous beaches of Mallorca, meet with friends and their newly added acquaintances and - moreover - occasionally party with the desert-creatures.

People are organizing party after party, making it more and more difficult to choose which one to attend. Luckily there’s always one indicator that facilitates the decision massively; a four-point-grading-system, fortunately introduced by some savvy multi-cultural circle of sages, dictates to use a very distinct validation before reaching a decision regarding that matter: physical appearance of the expected female-party-guests, approximated probability of the chance to get laid with one of the favoured specimen, estimated quantity of alcoholic drinks to be consumed by oneself during the evening, and - usually to be stated as one of the first points in this essential hierarchy of sagacities - music.
Using this exceedingly helpful tool, until this very day we’ve always been able to be at the right place at the even righter time. Therefor no body of you is to be worried about our private-lifes any more.

As far as I can say it today, there are some nice days to come during the following weeks as well, since we are about to play paintball with two thirds of the ERASMUS students next week and swimming- and partying season don’t seem to end any time soon. So stay tuned to learn more about us suffering like this for the following eight months.

Gasping for air after taking in the last two 5l-bottles of water to our flat in El Molinar I admired Matjaz and Bojan handling to carry like 25 shopping-bags on each hand quite conversant. As I mentioned before, the day after we moved in, we got some visitors from Slovenia. And these five hungry mouths wanted to be filled at least twice a day!

Having our pockets full of money we didn’t mind preparing the most prosperous dishes I had seen in a long time. As to say - Bojan and Matjaz did. Seems like I really took a lucky shot, when I ran into these two guys. Motivated as they always are, Trifko didn’t mind preparing Cevapcici for all our guests while Matjaz did french fries and salad for a full-fledged army! Of course they had also invited our new best friends - the Genova-Girls - over for dinner.
Actually today I’m having slight difficulties to tell the story of our housewarming-party exactly the way it happened back then. Since my memories of that time mostly consist of irratic pictures of drunk-people, walking on Paseo Maritimo, and me getting rid of my dinner, I would really like to let the pictures speak for themselves. But as it is obvious for everybody who followed that link, due to lack of camera-geeks partying with us, this is not possible in that case. So I’ll just go ahead then…

After having approximately 1 million Cevapcici each, we ran into two bottles of Havana Club, some limes, brown sugar and smashed ice, which accidentaly happened to be all mixed up in tidily cleaned glasses with straws right next to them. Unnecessary to say, that I gladly managed to pour the missing coke into the drinks.
Next scene happened on the beach… where suddenly everybody was looking at me as if they were waiting for me to do something… It took me some time to look down on the sandy floor and to identify the sparkling something as to be mine. After two more slammers the cab I suddenly was in had to stop due to the driver’s ridiculous impression of me wanting to get rid of something right next to the partying crowd on Paseo Maritimo. Uncool.

After recovering from this Waterloo some days later, we showed our lovely guests a little bit around the island. Casey sacrifized herself to support a second car and act as our tour-guide for Cap-Formentor. Luckily I’ve been at the exact same spot one day earlier with some colleagues from the University of Vienna. The fact that I skipped one or two days of my spanish-course at the university should only be mentioned along the way…

So there were we. Sleepless, homeless, demotivated, slightly drunk. Since our adventurous search for an appartment lasted already for three days, Ilonka(Slo) and Casey(US) assisted us in contacting landlords and agencies. Might have been because they were such nice girls who wanted to make the world a better place, fighting the evil, helping the helpless. Or because Bojan and Matjaz were staying at their two-rooms-flat in Genova for five days now - together with Casey’s guests from the United States. But seriously - if you would ask me, I couldn’t tell why they did it.
Fact is, we eventually found a wonderful place to stay. Walking around to find our parked car somewhere south-east of Palma city centre, we just wanted to end this day’s search as we finally encountered our last resort. It appeared to us like The Ten Commandments must have appeared to the jewish during the Exodus. An orange-based sign, with big black letters, saying se alquila and giving away a handwritten telephone-number. Needless to say, we were totally stunned.

Immediately after C.P.R kicked in and Bojan recovered from this georgeous experience we called this guy - Juan-Carlos - met his wife later this evening and moved in the next day. We considered the terms and conditions more or less as irrelevant facts - as we couldn’t understand what this very nice and strongly haired spanish guy told us anyway - and concentrated on how to move our inflatable airmatrace in one of the apartment’s two(!) bedrooms. At that time it seemed considerably reasonable to take a two-room-apartment for 750euro for giving a home to three people, well aware of the fact that one of us three would most likely have to occupy either the living-room or the winter-garden for the time-being.

Since the winter-garden directly accessed to the terrase with a beautiful view to the beach, I didn’t have to do much of a consideration to know where to put up my camp. Even though there was obviously some effort to be put in this room to convert it from the former dining-”room” to my throbbing antrum of love, I quite excitingly accepted this challenge.

So definitely a new era seemed to dawn. We ultimately ended our rough and painful life on the palmesian streets and started to enjoy the comfortable cosiness of our very own home… waiting for the next adventure to come up… five guests for a week - arriving the next day.

Making my way through the mediteranean metropolis of Palma de Mallorca by most eloquently asking for directions on the street I eventually managed to attend the intensive spanish course which would - hopefully - earn me the scholarship for september. Not having any clue I consequently entered a classroom for intermedios basicos where I - starting to memorize all numbers from 100 to a thousand in spanish - felt quite comfy! Unfortunately some observant teacher stuck me into the course for intermedios superiores some three days later. But it goes without saying that I managed to have a fairly pleasant time at this class full of female russian language students and spanish-freshmen. Not fooling away my money I got to know two pretty hidious slovenian guys who - not having neither any clue of spanish-language nor of finding a residence in this mere catalan city - exhibited a quite familiar style of humor when trying to speak german after having a cup of coffee in our descretely extended lunch brake.
Knowing about not having a chance of getting laid with one of the frigid russians I hopped on the next opportunity of spendig some fun-time in Palma and joined Matjaz and Bojan on their adventurous ride to the university. As these two master’s students had come to Mallorca by car we - once again - challenged the incredible road network where Matjaz, Bojan (aka Trifko) and I figured out how mallorquin style of driving really must be tought in driving-schools:

So, Maria-Magdalena-Veronica-Ana-Martina-Sonia. Brauchst di ned fürchten vorm Fahren, wir gehen’s ganz langsam an… Schau - gehst langsam runter von der Kupplung, gibst a bissl Gas beim Wegfahren und !”%!(% SCHNEIDST DEN WAPPLER DER GRAD AUF DER RECHTEN SPUR IM KREISVERKEHR FÄHRT DAMITST DIE AUSFAHRT ERWISCHST (%&”/!”&
Na schau, woar ja scho’ ganz guat.

It goes without saying that slovenians are quite familiar with this style of driving. Therefor after checking out the strategically carefully picked location of the university campus of the UIB, 7.5km outside the city, we kept going, finally deciding to move in together for the following couple of months. Wisely having delayed signing the contract for my first apartment I was free to join these two crazy chicks on a tour through the most fancy districts of Palma looking for a mansion that would fit their expectations. Of course I was the only one mildly understanding what newspaper ads and shields hanging on diverse balconies were saying, so I was officially announced austrian translation machine. Three tough days of driving around the city, entering derelicted buildings, calling landlord after landlord and real estate agency after real estate agency where followed by pure agony and chronic remorse… more to come

So this is what I do… three and a half weeks after the arrival at my island I haven’t eaten much, or gone to see the city. Basically I’m living on a terrace somewhere half way between Palma and the Airport, but hey - what the hell… I got internet!! Looks like three weeks of abstinence and abslolute abstemiousness of alcohol or partying finally paid off!

But well - let’s have a look. Tremendous exaggeration doesn’t take us nowhere. So here’s what really happened:
I got to Palma on September 3rd - all alone, all lost in a city where they even pronounce prevalent names like Burgerking or Microsoft in odd ways of twisting tongues. Luckily a nice mallorquin guy had supported me with just enough information to manage one third of my way to the apartement I rented via telephone some days ago. Since I had to agree on switching rooms with some funny spanish who instantly didn’t want to move out of the 300m² flat I rented a room at primarily I was excessively delighted that Arturo had found me some other place to crash at: 200m², two french, two spanish and me, next to Placa d’España (somehow the Westbahnhof located on a kind of Gürtel-like ring around the inner city). So there I was. Calling my landlord trying to figure out how to find the very street I was supposed to be at one-and-a-half hours earlier I ended up taking a cab to go like five times around one block to access the ludicrous one-way-system of Palma de Mallorca the right way and to stop just 120m from where I first jumped on the taxi… generously paying 6,50 EUR of course (since I had two suitcases an obviously reasonable sum).
Entering the apartment in C./ Patronat Obrero No.28 I was fairly impressed by the palace-like look of my accomodation - not that it was that big, but as empty and cold as the entrance hall of an medieval castle with rooms the size of one of these fancy little dungeons we all got to appreciate so much watching 1960’s bw-knights-movies. Luckily the french (and only) guy I met there within the following four days was sincere enough to demonstrate his interest in my arrival by going to bed right after I entered the flat. Thus I grabbed the Mallorca-GuideBook my lovely mum got me the other day to figure out how to get to the institute the next morning, where I was supposed to start my spanish course last friday. Cozily snuggling on the diligently placed pallet in my room I fell asleep right after the gastly beeping noise coming from some construction site hushed.