Mallorca in our final week here!

So it's finally here - our last week in the Port 😟  Bittersweet sums it up really.  We're sad to leave as we've had such a wonderful time here, but it's the right thing and right time for us.  But more of that later and first to local PP news!

We've had more than our fair share of classic Spanish bureaucracy this past week!  Firstly we tried for the second time to pay the plusvalía tax on the sale of our apartment here which is payable at the town hall and theoretically should be done within 30 days of the sale.  Our solicitor obtained the paperwork from the tax office around that time so we hot-footed it down to the town hall to pay.  Apparently the man who deals with this comes down from Pollensa every Wednesday until 1pm.  I returned on the Wednesday.  He made a careful note of my details on his handwritten log and then.....computer say no.  Not on the system yet.  So he can't take the money.  Come back in about a month and try again he says.  We returned this Wednesday, careful note of my details again and.....yep, you've guess it, computer still say no.  Awkward as we're moving on 27th.  So he's told us to keep ringing/emailing to see when it appears on the system, after which they will actually be able to take our money if we pay it in at a bank on the mainland. Ah well, we tried.

The second delightful bureaucratic experience was regarding our move.  The removals company breezily told us that we'd need to pop into the policia local and request some official signs to put outside our apartment to prevent cars parking there on the dates/times listed so that the lorry can get good access.  So we duly turned up at the police station.  Closed.  A lovely man waiting for the social services office next door told us they were out on patrol.  So we had a coffee and came back and a friendly policia gave us the correct form and told us the drill.  And only in Spain would it be thus: 

• fill in this form and take it to the town hall office down the corridor;
• the town hall will check the form and details, decide how much it will cost and give us another piece of paper stating this;
• we then take the original form and the money one to the nearest Colonya bank and pay;
• return to the town hall office with three pieces of paper, get the original one stamped;
• take everything to the police station in Pollensa 48 hours beforehand to collect the signs;
• put out the signs 24 hours beforehand;
• return the signs to Pollensa.

Hmmmmm 🤔 added bonus entertainment was provided in the town hall office as the amount you pay depends on the size of the lorry.  I had no idea so I rang the removals company whose receptionist is shall we say not the sharpest tool in the shed - after a stunned silence she proclaimed it was 'a normal sized lorry'.  I put the phone on speaker so the helpful lady in the town hall could hear it for herself.  Cue much merriment 😂 her colleague was pretty amused as well.  Anyway, between about 5 of us we worked out the rough dimensions of a 'normal sized lorry' and are hoping for the best.  And then when we went to pay by card at the bank we were told they only took cash 😂  Oh what fun we had....   The bonus was that all of this was undertaken in Spanish and was good practice for me although afterwards I needed a lie down in a darkened room to give my overtaxed brain a break!

In local Covid news, there are 4 active cases in the municipality with two diagnosed earlier this week.  And vaccinations are still more than slow with this past week finally seeing most over 80s getting the 'call up'.  The national government is sticking to its target of vaccinating 70% of the population by the summer.  And because regions can decide how to manage things for themselves, some are opting to save doses to be sure they can administer the second shot while others are using them as they get them.  Nationally vaccinations have yet to start for the 55-80 age group largely due to the fact that Spain has decided not to use the Astra Zeneca jab on anyone over 55 which rather limits the options.  Here in the Balearics all care home residents and frontline healthcare workers have been vaccinated and I'm pretty sure they've done most of the emergency workers such as police, and also teachers.  In any event, the rest of us have Covid vaccine envy of the UK if we're honest, but just have to continue to be patient.

The Sunday meal for local needy families registered with social services continues to be provided at the Bellaverde restaurant and this week chefs Carlos Escandell Proust and Hernan Biblioni from Iru were involved in making a delicious smelling pumpkin and potato stew  as we walked past with the dogs just as the queues were beginning to form.  This is such a wonderful initiative and it's great to see people making their way home with their plastic containers and carriers full of good food, but equally it's so sad that this is needed at all.  

More local restaurants have now opened including Marcs but the pool of people to use them remains static and small.  How long some can continue is anyone's guess but we all just have to hope that tourism resumes at some point, the difficulty being how few of us who live here have been vaccinated.  It's a real dilemma.  From this weekend, German tourists have been allowed to enter the Balearics (with a negative PCR test) and of course there is a wide range of opinions as to the wisdom of this which I will not add to here; suffice it to say, what happens in due course will be most interesting......

Bar Manolo which closed last year following the owner's death, has now re-opened which is good to see.  But Hostal Borras remains closed for the foreseeable future.  And the other day I walked past Loqueria (just back from Manolo) and noticed this brilliant sign on the door:

I've drawn a yellow arrow to help, but basically it says "We are open from 11.00 to 12.00....more or less (mas o menos)".  Love it!  Just soooo Spanish (well the owners are Italian actually but.....) 😂

Yesterday was my last radio show on English Radio Pollensa which consisted of some great party music with the theme of a Goodbye Party for One as only one person can broadcast from the studio in Pollensa at a time.  It was great but really sad for me as it's something I've totally loved doing for several years now.  But I'm hoping to find another opportunity to be on air on the mainland in due course so fingers crossed 🤞

And finally, this is it!  My last blog post about Mallorca (although not the last about our adventures in Spain, there won't be one next week due to no wiFi but hopefully thereafter).  We've loved living here and have no regrets whatsoever.  Our time here has enabled us to settle in to life in Spain - the good and the rather more challenging - and we would do it all again.  This time next week we'll have been more than 24 hours in our new home although our belongings arrive on the Monday - so two nights on a camp bed and blow up mattress respectively it is then!  This is what awaits us:

Our lovely villa and garden is our dream home - and so we've called it Casa Sueño 😍  

Thanks so much to all of you for your kind messages - they mean a lot.  And we both hope that you'll all be back in your happy place of PP before too long.  In the meantime, stay safe and take the very best of care 😘

Spain (Mallorca) in slightly more relaxed restrictions!

Well it's been exactly one year since the first lockdown here in Spain and what a journey we've all had.  At the moment the Balearics are taking baby steps down the path of the easing of restrictions but they are doing so VERY  gingerly - and whilst it's difficult not to be impatient I can't say I blame them.  From tomorrow bars/restaurants can open 30% capacity inside with tables of maximum 4 people from 2 households.  Outside terraces remain at 50% capacity under the same arrangements with everything still to shut at 5pm.  In addition a maximum of 6 people can mix from 2 households only and there is an easing of restrictions on shopping centres.  The curfew from 10pm to 6am remains.  As the weather is due to get colder this week, the opening of interiors will be welcome news to those who feel the cold although at 30% capacity, those seats will be highly sought after!

We've had some lovely sunny days this past week and on one of them I sat with a friend at the churrería in the square (where the Kashmir Indian restaurant used to be) with a cheeky cafe con leche and an even cheekier churros 😜

A tough gig indeed but someone has to do it!!

Other coffee venues this week - well it would be rude not to - have included La Vall and Stay whose terrace has to be one of the best in terms of a view so here is the view from where I sat:

In terms of vaccinations, around 74,000 people have been vaccination in Mallorca with just over 20,000 having received both doses.  They have focused on residential homes, essential professions (obviously including healthcare workers), teachers, the over 80s and senior dependents and caregivers.  I believe that they have, by and large, been using the Astra Zeneca jab and as Spain has decided not to use this for the over 55s, this has meant that the essential profession workers have been the priority with the vaccinations they have.  I'm assuming they are waiting until they have sufficient numbers of other vaccinations in order to roll things out for the under 80s but over 55s.  This is pretty frustrating of course but it is what it is and we just have to wait.

In great news, since Monday (8th) there have been no active cases of Covid-19 in the Pollensa municipality although the PAC in Pollensa have reminded people on Radio Pollenca and through social media that it is important not to become complacent and I think (or maybe I hope!) that most of us have got that message loud and clear!

This week saw the XVII Rally Clásico Mallorca and part of the route was around Pollensa, the caves at Campanet and Lluc.  I didn't see any of it, but the route also takes in Sa Calobra which is not for the faint-hearted! 😳  Anyway, well done to all who took part.

The tourist information centre down by the marina here in the Port is really coming along nicely and this week they finished the plastering of the outside.  It certainly looks like it won't be too long before they get things like glazing in, here it is compared to last week:

It's certainly good to see the information centre back in its original location 👍

The other day as I was walking the dogs past Bisanyes patisseria up near the petrol station, I glanced again at the sign in the window saying that it was up for lease due to retirement and as I did so it struck me - the word retirement in Spanish is 'jubilación' and I realised that whilst the English word retirement implies a withdrawal or pullback from work (not inaccurate of course), the Spanish word has much closer linguistic links to the word jubilation; it occurred to me that the Spanish approach is much more celebratory and joyous and I rather like that 🥳

And so to rather more personal news.  Writing it makes it seem more real somehow but..... this is my penultimate blog post about PP.  This is because on 27 March we are moving to the Valencia region.  During the first lockdown we, like many of us, had plenty of time to reflect.  And whilst we reflected on how lucky we were to live in such a wonderful place in a lovely large apartment with plenty of outside space, it is rented and so doing work on it and making it totally our own isn't part of the deal really.  And we really really miss having a garden 😒 as do the dogs!  We realised that we wanted to be able to just let the dogs into the garden as well as enjoying a garden ourselves.  In a nutshell we realised that we don't quite have the lifestyle we want here and because Mallorca, and the Pollensa area in particular, are so expensive property-wise we could never afford a house here - sad but just how it is.  And so we have sold our apartment here (we had a small one we rented out) and bought a villa on the mainland - as you do in the middle of a global pandemic! 😂  We are both sad and excited all at the same time.  Sad because we will miss some lovely friends here and I will most definitely miss my job and doing my show on English Radio Pollensa, but excited because we will finally have our dream home surrounded by orange groves on the edge of a lovely little town inland from Denia.  

There will be a final blog post about PP on the I Love PP Facebook page next Sunday and thereafter I will continue the blog but it will of course not be about PP.  So it will be on Twitter (SarahatSarum) or on my own FB page but no longer on I Love PP.  I have had such lovely comments about the blog and feel sad that I will no longer be able to update people on PP after next week but we have to do what we think is right for us - life is definitely too short.

In the meantime.... stay safe and hasta el próximo domingo!

Spain (Mallorca) in very slightly relaxed restrictions!

It's been quite a week this week as on Tuesday the bars and restaurants here were finally able to open their terraces on Tuesday, only until 5pm mind you but still.....we were all quite giddy with excitement! 😝  We went for a coffee at Meraki and sat on an actual terrace on an actual chair at an actual table with coffee in an actual cup and saucer - pretty heady stuff!   You don't really appreciate things until they're not there do you?  Anyway, this past year has taught me to appreciate the little things if nothing else and sitting on a terrace, even in fairly chilly weather, is one of them.  You know who's law means that the weather has been a little chilly this week but we have had a couple of warmer days on one of which we were lucky enough to have a wonderful menu del dia at Ca'n Ferra.  

The work on the new Tourist Information Centre in the Port which I mentioned in a previous blog post is gathering pace and the new building is taking shape nicely:

It certainly looks like the town is investing in tourist services.......... 😜

Today was overcast with rain forecast although luckily it held off until mid afternoon; it is however scheduled to be wet for a few days which isn't going to help the bars/restaurants a great deal 😞 but in order to keep our step count up, we parked further round the bay and then walked through to the Sunday market in Alcudia via the beach in front of the villas at Voramar.  En route, we made friends with this cheeky fella:

Check out those horns 🐐  Once in Alcudia we rewarded ourselves with....yes, you guessed it, another coffee on an actual terrace....well you get the idea!  Alcudia Old Town is as lovely as ever 😍

There weren't many people about although the market itself was fairly bustling despite everything being well distanced so that was good to see.  

This week I finished yet another 1,000 piece puzzle and have turned into quite the puzzle nerd over this past year.  I have developed a system for doing puzzles now that works for me - yes I have indeed become that tragic 😂  My latest triumph was greatest rock albums (204 in total) and whilst doing it I had great fun noting the ones in my record collection so it's probably right up there as one of my favourite puzzles so far:

Last week I mentioned the stencils that have been painted onto streets locally and wondered about who had put them there.  As a reminder they look like this:

Well now I know.  As you can see from the picture, it's near a drain and this is the common denominator because it's a scheme launched by the Environmental Authorities who have been spraying them near drains using various stencil pictures to raise awareness that anything that goes down the drain ends up in the sea.  The initiative is called "The Sea Starts Here".  What a great idea 👏 let's hope it has the required effect.

Covid numbers are excellent now in the Pollensa area with only one positive case - long may that continue!  On seeing the news from the UK, we still have vaccination envy though as there are very elderly non-care home residents here who have yet to be vaccinated here so I guess those of us rather younger are going to have wait for some time yet.  Still, if we can keep the numbers down, we'll get there safely eventually.  Where and when the restrictions will ease here next we don't know but certainly all the Spanish regions have reached an agreement to restrict travel over the Easter week in order to prevent the spread of coronavirus.  And of course for the second year running Spain's famous Easter celebrations have been cancelled 😟

Finally, the Sunday meal at the Bellaverde Restaurant in collaboration with Pollenca Cares has taken place for the third successive weekend, providing 250 portions of hot food to local needy  families - you can see a video of an interview by local television with Svenja Galle, owner of the Bellaverde (her part is in Spanish) here which gives you a good overview of this initiative even if you don't understand Spanish!  Wonderful work by all concerned 💕

Stay safe and hasta el próximo domingo!