It's three weeks now since we were dismasted, but we are still here in Ibiza.. We are not happy about how long it takes before they can even start on the work, order materials and all that is necessary in order to get us ship shape again..But then it is understandable that it takes time to produce the offers as there are so many details to work out. Well, there are four companies that have been asked to give an offer, two on Mallorca and two on the mainland. Hopefully we get a decision on where to go early next week. Thank you to everyone who sent mails and messages, it was good to know that you are thinking of us! After some days of feeling very sorry for ourselves we found that we had to accept the situation and rather find out how we could benefit from it. Realise that this might happen again, that the circumstances rather than our plans decide when and where we can go..Anyway, the first thing is that we get the chance to see more of Ibiza.
Eivissa is the largest town on te island and is also called Ibiza city. With some imagination you can see that the names resembles each other, they only differ slightly in what tongue has been most influential. The summer season is still not quite over, and quite a few charter planes continue to fly in tourists every day. The weather is still good enough for beach life, and even though some restaurants seem to have ended the season others have quite a few guests. It is quite expensive here, so it's probably good that we came here outside the high season. Here are four different marinas, and they are all in the upper price range. Most of the yachts here are motor yachts that seems to go out mainly for daytrips. Anyway, that's what we observe this late in the season. Another reason for coming to Ibiza seems to be the club's. These large discoteques have shows going on every night, and people pay tens of Euros for the tickets. Ingeborg tried to tempt her brother to join her at "Harry Potter Party", a club evening for the youngsters. But he was not interested.. so she will probably have to wait until she is back in Ibiza, some time later in her life.. We have spent some days walking around in Dalt Vila, the old city. This area is a well conserved castle with a surrounding wall dating back to the renessance period, churches and other buildings from different periods and several museums. Restaurants and souvenir shops for the tourists are plentyful, but there are also several private homes inside the city walls. To learn more about the history we have visited the Necropolis, the Archeologic museum and a presentation of the muslim period in Madina Yabisa. We also tried to find remains of the salt production out in the marshland in Ses Salines, but ended up with too many mosquito bites and returned to town without seeing anything of historic interest.
The school work has been running quite smoothly lately. Both students are quite eager to study spanish, but they also spend hours on other topics of their curriculum. We have been watching films in the evenings and been reading books from our small ship library. Thorstein has taken up his hobby of painting "Warhammer" figurines.
The weather has been a mix of rainy days and sunny days, but it is quite warm anyhow. So we find it quite nice.
Tomorrow is the National Day of Spain, and we look forward to see how they celebrate!
That's all for now! I'll post an update as soon as we know where to and when we are going from here!
Gjertrud
