This is the last of my Mallorca posts. I’m already excited to write about all of the things that we’ve been doing since we got to Paziols: the kids are great, and we’ve already taken them on tons of walks around the area.
But before I get ahead of myself: this is Ses Salines. Ses Salines is the name of both a town and a salt mine in the Colonia San Jordi, a popular location for tourists on the southern tip of Mallorca. It’s about a twenty-minute drive from where I stayed in Llombards, and the Canadian and I liked to go every other day (when we weren’t exploring new beaches.)

The beach at Colonia San Jordi is great because of its length: you can walk for several kilometers along the shore. There are bars and restaurants on the beach, and there are tons of places to sit and tan or swim. It’s not as exciting as the secret beaches, but there are lots of people, and it’s a nice, familiar place to go and sit all day.
Ses Salines is right outside the San Jordi beach, and it’s the whole reason I’m writing this entry. Ses Salines are salt mines that were used all the way back to when the Romans colonized Mallorca. I had never seen salt mines before, and even though they aren’t opened to the public or really publicized in any way, I still found them very interesting to see.

Secret beach number four (and the final secret beach) is found in the Natural Park of Mondrago.

I showed you two of these nifty little signs yesterday, but I didn’t really explain them. Basically, all beaches (even the unguarded ones) have a map like this showing you where you are and who to call in an emergency. I like them because they help me to keep track of all the beaches I’ve seen, as well as to get back to them or recommend them if I want.

The first beach you stumble on in the park isn’t actually where we stopped. It’s got a very deep shoreline, which is pretty uncommon in the Mediterranean, but it reminded me a bit of my American beaches on the Atlantic.

There is a second beach as well, which you reach by means of a path that winds around some rocks. We were aiming for the third beach, which you can reach with a path through the woods. But we decided to be difficult again and keep going on the rocks.

It was difficult, but we got to see some cool things, like these craters full of sea salt, and it made finally reaching the beach much more worth it: swimming in the cool sea after that trek was unbelievable.

The actual beach was very similar to the one from the day before, but the Canadian says there were fewer fish. I have no idea: I just relished laying in the sun for one more day before leaving the shore for the next six weeks.

Where I currently am, in Paziols, there are a lot of fun streams and rivers to see (which you’ll be hearing about soon!), but the actual beaches are quite far away. I’m a mermaid at heart, and I miss the sea already.

While I’m sad to be leaving Spain, I’m really looking forward to the time I will spend in France. However, I still have quite a few things about Mallorca that never appeared here, so I’m going to do my best to get you all up-to-date about my last few days in Mallorca without ignoring Paziols.

So, on to the third of a series of four secret beaches. This one isn’t so much of a secret, as it is (finally) the original beach that sent us on such a wild goose chase. I’m glad it took us so long to find, because it led us to the other two, but I was also glad to finally see it.

Remember when I told you that this beach was meant to be directly behind those houses, very close to the second secret beach? Well, it was. Right around that bend of rocks. Except that the Canadian and I decided that we would go a different way… just to see if we could get there. After climbing over some rocks and trees, we finally found this little clearing.

That’s the beach where we were supposed to be. But we scrambled over the rest of the rocks like good little monkeys and finally got there.

It was similar to the other beaches, with one exception: the caves were a lot bigger. I didn’t get any great pictures, because they were kind of far out in the water, but the Canadian and I had brought a snorkel and mask, and we spent a lot of the afternoon looking at Mediterranean fish. They were pretty big… I’d had no idea that I was swimming with fish that large before, but they kind of blended in with the sand, so they were difficult to see without the mask.

When we’d finally had our fill, it was time to go: more rock scrambling.

This is the only way to access or leave the beach.

The Canadian fared fairly well… he has long legs, but I had to be helped by some kindly German people. They were probably laughing at me and my camera. Oh well.

That sign at the bottom is the second secret beach, by the way.

Are you sick of secret beaches yet? I promise there’s only one more left… and it’s a pretty cool one.

Firstly: a map. The Canadian is indicating our approximate location, inland a few minutes. The beaches that I have been talking about today and yesterday are as close as possible to where we live, just next to that big blue thing. That’s the water.

Secondly, as I promised: the second hidden beach. With a twist. This, apparently, isn’t even the beach we were looking for in the first place.

When we first set off to find the hidden “cave” beach, we couldn’t find the access parking lot, which is how we got to this  beach .

Then, when we finally did find the parking lot, we went to the beach that I’m posting about today and spent the afternoon, swimming and exploring the caves near the small sandy area. But when we described the beach to our friends, who had sent us on this wild goose chase to begin with, they told us that this wasn’t the beach they had indicated either! Oh well. We’re going to try to find that one today… apparently it’s past those houses in the picture above, but we spent an incredible afternoon on our newfound secret beach.

The actual sandy area is small, but we were lucky enough to find a spot right near the water, which the Canadian immediately went to test while I lay in the sun. There weren’t many other people, which is a huge contrast to our regular beach at the Colonia San Jordi.

Like the beach from the day before, this one was below street-level, and was buttressed on either side by high, sloping cliffs. Although instead of picking a path through the underbrush, there was a rickety staircase to use. Yay!

The water directly in front of the beach was very narrow: there were two caves on either side, after which the water spread out to where the rest of the sea was. The caves were fun to explore.

This one had a little sandy beach of its own at the back, which was a fun place to sit and look around. I feel like it would be a fun place to sit and drink… if it weren’t for that whole drowning thing.

I don’t care how much you hate me when I say: it’s awesome when the toughest part of your life is finding new beaches to explore.

I have made an important decision about this blog.

After reading the archives, it’s all starting to feel very haphazard. I barely understand it… and I lived it. I don’t know how you can be expected to understand it.

So here we go. I’m starting over. My name is Emily (or Amélie, if you prefer), and I live in Paris. Sometimes.

After my semester ended (I’m still in university), I went to Cannes to work at the film festival for two weeks, before moving on to Spain.

Right now, I’m living in Mallorca, Llombards, to be exact, with my boyfriend, the Canadian. We rent the downstairs apartment of the finca (Mallorcan farmhouse) that belongs to his friends, Ian and Katrina, who are English. We also have some German neighbors, who are renting the other finca apartment.

Every other day, the Canadian and I go to this one beach at the Colonia San Jordi, which I’ll be sure to tell you about as soon as I remember to take some pictures. Every day that we don’t go to San Jordi, though, we go exploring to find a new and exciting beach. The beaches are small and sometimes hard to find, but it’s an adventure every time.

The first time we did this, we went looking for one beach (to be continued tomorrow…) and found this beach. The Canadian pulled up to what looked like the side of a cliff. I didn’t particularly want to get out of the car… but I did it anyway.

The Canadian started to look for a path, so I followed him, my flip flops slipping, fairly sure that if I didn’t fall to my untimely death, I would at least ruin the white dress I was wearing. But the Canadian’s sense of direction served him well, and we stumbled down upon a flat surface that looked out onto the water.

There was a small bed of sand where two Spanish kids were already sunbathing, and further down there was more cliff, where a blonde girl was throwing sticks to her two dogs.

The Canadian and I laid our towels out in the sun and walked over to where the girl and the dogs were. Or at least we tried. The cliff was pretty low, but also very craggy. I decided to go barefoot and ended up hurting myself, but the Canadian didn’t fare much better with his slippy, slidy sandals. Eventually we made it down to the algae-covered bed of rocks and stood with the girl and her dogs, chatting and throwing sticks to them.

Beaches like the one in San Jordi, which is long and covered with bodies, are fun to go to every once in awhile. Heck, until I came to Spain, it was the only kind of beach I knew. But these little tiny beaches that no one knows about are so much fun to track down. I’m going to miss them when I leave.

I have by now traveled through much of Western Europe, but I have seen comparatively very little of the US. I was born and raised in New York, and I’ve seen a lot of the Eastern seaboard. I went to high school in New England, and I lived for one year in San Francisco, but I haven’t seen a lot of Middle America… I don’t really know where everyone else lives.

When I lived in Canada, I had a friend who liked to do random things, which was lucky, because I like to do random things too. One day, we decided we were going to go on a road trip with no destination, and so at five o’clock in the morning, I picked him up, and we drove. We drove from Toronto to New York State, and then we decided that we wanted to cross another state boarder. After consulting our map, we decided to go to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

We took the entire trip on back roads, driving past houses and tiny towns made up of no more than a gas station. We drove on winding, hilly tarmac, often the only car rushing past the landscapes of rural Pennsylvania.

We stopped on the shoulder every so often to take pictures: I had never concentrated so much on where I was instead of where I was going. We didn’t actually reach Lancaster County until the following morning, but it didn’t seem to matter.

I drove for ten hours, and though my sanity was temporarily threatened, in retrospect, I loved that trip. I loved everything about the all-American vibe we got from every town we stopped in. I loved taking pictures of little things I never would have seen otherwise.

I loved the quaint diner we stopped in when we arrived in Lancaster County in the morning, and I loved the severely cheap breakfast that we were served there (and the unlimited coffee).

Being in Europe makes me appreciate the pure Americana of a trip like that. America is just so big compared to Europe: they don’t have landscapes like that over here. There are rural areas, make no mistake, but everything about them seems to be quaint… a little bit false. There’s something so comforting to me about knowing that places like Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania exist somewhere in the world.

I have a hard time writing about the place where I am.

The second I leave, it’s easy: I suddenly remember all the things I loved about being there, why it’s so special and so different from where I am now. But writing about the place where I am is a struggle, which is why you haven’t read anything yet about the past several weeks I’ve been spending in Llombards, Mallorca.

I don’t know why I’m suddenly able to write about it. Maybe it’s because I’m so close to leaving: in eight days, I’ll be headed back to Paziols, and you can bet that that’s when you’ll be hearing all of my stories about Llombards and Spain. For now, though, all I have to offer is this story. Maybe it will speak to you and let you know how much I love it here, even if I can’t really say why myself.

I’m living in the downstairs apartment of a finca that my boyfriend’s friends own. Ian and Katrina moved to Spain several years ago, and although they’re old enough to be my parents, we all get along great. They rent this apartment to travelers who want to have the true country experience of living with rural Spain, and they rent the other half of the finca to a German couple.

Ian has installed a small pool, which is right next to the deck that we rent along with the apartment. It looks out into the fields that Ian owns along with the land, as well as into the next yard, where there are two horses being kept.

I love to sit out on the deck with my dinner (no earlier than nine… we are in Spain, after all) and watch the horses. They chase each other through the pasture, completely oblivious to the world around them. They don’t know anything about the horses that live in New York or Paris to draw carriages of tourists through the streets. I doubt that these horses have pulled a carriage in their entire lives.

“Vienna” still isn’t about Vienna—I loved the Austrian city covered in snow at Christmastime, but not enough to devote that song to it. Vienna, for me, is about Paris.

“You got so much to do and only so many hours in a day.”

“You can’t be everything you want to be before your time, although it’s so romantic on the borderline tonight.”

“Don’t you know that only fools are satisfied? Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true.”

It’s so true, it’s almost a cliché. In fact, it’s sometimes embarrassing to admit how true “Vienna” feels because of how much everyone else agrees with you. How could this song have touched so many different people in so many different ways?

And then, most of all, “waits for you.” The idea that a city even can wait is so foreign to a New Yorker, where buildings are knocked down and built back up again before you can blink, and storefronts change as often as the seasons. And yet, Paris has been waiting for centuries. Each time I arrive in Paris, I wait patiently while I check into a hotel in a new part of the city that I don’t know. I wait for that moment that I now know is so perfectly Paris.

When I come out of Notre-Dame-St. Michel Métro, and see the booksellers on the Quai d’Orsay, I remember. I feel at home. I remember suddenly how long Paris has been waiting. Cities in the States wait for no one, but on this side of the Atlantic, buildings have been patiently standing on the same streets for hundreds of years. Somehow, even though I know it’s childish, when I step onto the Quai d’Orsay and recognize those buildings again, I feel as though Paris has been waiting for me.

My father’s family comes from Sicily, which is technically not Southern Italy either, but I knew that my roots lay in this country that was so mysterious to me. I had no idea that I would feel so at home in a place that I, and even my father, had never been.

Naples is not a city that most people enjoy. It ranks up there with Marseille as a “dirty” city, a city that is not worth visiting when there are such beautiful things (Capri or Monaco) to see. I have never been to Marseille, but if it really does rank with Naples, then I know one thing for sure: I will love it.

I think people need to give Naples more time. Naples doesn’t jump out and welcome you like Paris or London or Rome. The charm in Naples lies under the grit, behind some of the daunting doors, and within the reign of the camorra*. So much of Naples’ beauty exists behind closed doors: in private courtyards or monasteries that a tourist wouldn’t think of entering. The best meals lie in simplicity: the best restaurants are not those with a view of Capri, but the tiny, family-run pizza places that make simple, homey dishes of pasta and tomatoes and the native mozzarella di bufala. Naples is not a rich city. It is not fancy, like Rome and Milan and the other northern cities. It never was.

Naples is crowded, and in this way, it reminds me of New York. The streets hardly have room for the cars, what with all the pedestrians, stray dogs, scooters and vendors setting up their booths on them. This connection with New York automatically made me think that Naples was a fast-paced city, like my old home, but in jumping to this conclusion, I was terribly wrong.

Time in Naples cannot be so easily defined. Time in Naples does not function like it does in other parts of the world. Naples exists in two times, as so much of Italy does: the present and the past. So much of Naples is in the past. Neapolitans are superstitious and religious, combining both rural folklore of curses and hexes and the traditional beliefs of the Catholic Church in their daily lives. Nowhere else have I seen the mix of traditional Western medicine and pure Christian faith so intertwined in the case of illness or death as it is in Naples.

I won’t say I’ve never met a city I didn’t like. I’m a native New Yorker, and I’m generally more forgiving of cities than most people. That said, I really did not like Chicago. Lancaster, Pennsylvania (the city, not the county) gave me the willies. I really did not like Genoa, in the north of Italy, at all. But when it comes to Naples, I’ll take it, garbage and all.

*The well-known Mafia runs Sicily (and much of New York), but further north in Naples, it is the camorra, the crime organization that is built, not upon families, but upon a well-established hierarchy. The camorra is involved in every business in Naples in some way, and is so ingrained in the commerce and life in Naples that it would be almost impossible to eradicate it.

 

One of the top tourist destinations in the south of France is the principality of Monaco. As the legend goes, the first Grimaldi snuck into the city dressed as a monk in order to take it over, the Italian word for monk giving the state its name. Monaco is indeed beautiful, especially in the summer, and the palace is worth visiting, if only to watch the archaic changing of the guard, a ceremony that the French take even more seriously than the Brits, who are famous for their version at Buckingham palace. However, following the morning in Monaco, the village of
Eze will make the trip into the Alpes Maritimes worth it.

Eze is built into the side of a mountain: as you climb, you can browse its many artisan shops and art galleries filled with paintings and jewelry constructed by the locals of this small village. Climb to the top of the stone stairs carved into the mountains, and you will find not only a restaurant, where you can regain some of the calories you burned climbing to reach it, but also a garden of exotic flowers that rivals the one in Monaco, established by the first Prince Reiner, Albert I himself.

From the top of the village of Eze, you can see all the way to Menton on one side, almost to Italy, and to Nice on the other. Surrounding you are the mountains that provided the same bright white schist used to build the royal palace in Monaco. Below, the clock tower rises to greet you at eye level, and the flat roofs of houses are scattered like uneven stepping-stones below.

The first time I went to Eze was on a clear day in February, which already feels like spring in the south of France. On that afternoon, as I looked down on the houses in the village, a little girl was jumping rope on her roof. The bright neon of the plastic cord seemed so silly against the true green of the mountain landscape. Her backyard is one of the most beautiful panoramas I’ve ever seen. She woke up every morning to see the sun rise over the Alps from her bedroom window; she could walk out her front door to see the Mediterranean Sea. As I descended the stone steps to go back to the real world, I wondered how long it would take that little girl to realize how lucky she is.