Robbed in Palma and sweating to death…
So, the trip to Palma was an interesting event. It started out well, with some shopping and walking around in the old city, looking around and doing some good old-fashioned sightseeing (on our own, we didn’t want to pay a guide lots of money to tell us something we could read in a 3 Euro map). After seeing the great gothic cathedral, we walked towards some restaurants when three ladies came up to us and pinned some olive twigs on our shirts. Now, this was right next to a church, so our reaction was just that this was probably something in relation to a christian ritual of some sort, so we didn’t think too much of it. When they asked us to pay them just 1 cent for each twig, Marianne got out her wallet and when she couldn’t immediately find two cents they started poking around to help her find the money in her wallet… and they found something alright, the only problem was that we didn’t notice that the 40 Euros were missing until some time later, and when we ran back to find the ladies they were of course long gone…
Our reactions to this were mixed; (1) anger, (2) embarassment and (3) amazement. The anger part goes without saying, how can people take advantage of other people who in good faith wanted to take part of an old ritual. Embarassment because we had been warned about pocket thieves. The amazement part is based on the fact that these women could have made a carreer as illutionists if they gave up their current (and probably quite lucrative) profession. How they managed to lure away both mine and Marianne’s attention enough to snatch money and receipts from a closed wallet right in front of us is just brilliant..
The worst part of all this is that it has changed two people quite dramatically. From being the kind that believes in the good of all people (ok, naive is a synonym to that, I know), we have now become quite cynical when it comes to people we meet. Our current strategy is: if we want something, we go get it ourselves, and never say yes to anything offered to us from strangers. In a way we were quite lucky that Marianne picked up her wallet instead of mine from the backpack; I had just withdrawn money from an ATM so I had about 160 Euros (1500 NOK).
Oh well, lesson learned and life goes on.
The weather has been incredible lately, with temperatures exceeding 30 degrees during the day and 20 degrees at nights. Now this is both good news and bad news. For people like us who are born and raised in the snow, wearing t-shirts all year even if the temperature outside is 20 below, 30 is about 10 degrees too much to be comfortable. So we have limited our adventures to dragging ourselves and several bottles of water down to the pool by the hotel, and staying either next to or in the pool until our bodys give warnings that they need refueling.
Sleeping in these kinds of temperatures is also a challenge. Waking up in the middle of the night because you’re either sweaty and cold and need to drag the blanket over you or sweaty and warm and need to kick it off isn’t funny, especially when it happens for the twentieth time that night.
Enough whining for now, these are just minor problems and we’re really enjoying the holiday. The fact that our most long-term plan is thinking about where to have dinner tonight says it all.
Happy holidays!! *raising cold Fanta Lemon with condensation drops on it*
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