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.