Five days after returning from the white isle and I feel like I’ve only just recovered. Four days and five nights of absolute locura, we spent it all either drunk or hungover. With two fiestas often being squeezed into one day and our only respite being sought on the white sandy beaches or the sun beds by the pool for a couple of hours each day, it really was manic. Non-stop fun in the sun with a group of close friends – what else do you need? Even though the whole trip was immense, I’ve compiled a list of some of the memories that most stand out for me.
-The bus chants, one being ‘Alcalá, Alcalá, somos de Erasmus, estamos borrachos, el resultado nos da igual’ or for any monolingual readers: ‘Alcalá, Alcalá, we are Erasmus, and we are wasted, we don’t care how it ends up’. This, along with two other chants boasting equally intellectual and thought-provoking lyrics, was sung throughout the entire 20-minute bus journeys from the hotel to the big clubs in San Antonio every night. While fun and quite a good laugh to sing along to the first couple of times, it did start to get a little bit repetitive, plus the accompanying percussion – drumming on the windows and roof of the bus – left a lot to be desired. (Despite this, I still think it would have fared better in Eurovision than Jedward’s rather abhorrent entry.) On the second night, the chanting was taken too far when someone staggered onto the 6am bus back to the hotel slurring it at the top of his lungs. With the majority of us slumped in our seats resembling a scene out of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ this was not the most appropriate time to recommence the singing and the banging. Luckily, just as he was starting the second round, a voice from the back of the bus bellowed out “Nobody likes you!” after which the chanting rapidly ceased. Quote of the trip? I think so.
-The boat party. In an ideal world, this should have been my sober night, as I have a tendency towards sea-sickness – therefore a five hour voyage across the Mediterranean Sea combined with alcohol would have (or so I thought ) resulted in disaster. The reality? I was drunk before we’d even left the port. In my defence, the ferry didn’t set sail for the island until an hour and a half after we’d boarded. Still, I feel that this was quite an achievement, and despite the biting wind, the fact that the floor had turned into a swimming pool and walking from A to B in a drunken state being made even more difficult than usual due to the rocky sea, it was my favourite night of the holiday. Before leaving for Ibiza, when we read that the ferry was a ‘party boat’, we were sceptical that we’d want to drink after having been sat on a coach for six hours or before the real partying commenced once we'd arrived at the island. How wrong we were. With 2,500 Erasmus students all in one place, it wouldn’t have made sense to not have a party. My memory of the night is kind of hazy, but I remember managing to sneak a giant bottle of Malibu from my suitcase up onto the deck, finishing the giant bottle of Malibu, accidentally stepping into the poolside shower whilst trying to get a better view of the swimming pool on deck and consequntly being irritated that my right foot got a bit wet, and then several minutes later getting absolutely destroyed by a Super Soaker, which helped to put things a little more in perspective. Dripping wet and chilled to the bone due to the wind, I then decided it would be a great idea to order three cups of tea from the bar (with each order asking where the spoon was even though the frustrated bartender had explained to me the first time round that the spoon was attached to the packet of sugar I received with each cup). Having warmed up a little bit, I then began to feel drowsy and so decided to have a quick kip on the wooden floor (all of the seats were taken) which turned out to be not such a good idea after all. Other than that, I remember little else of the events of that evening!
-The hotel swimming pool. With the amount of time we spent in or around the pool sunbathing, sleeping off hangovers, floating around on lilos etc, anyone would have thought we’d been living in the desert for the past nine months. Coming from Alcalá, where (being central) there is no sea, we really did treat it like an oasis. All of our complaining back in Alcalá about the lack of sea/swimming pool (there is one next to the local park but we’ve been advised against going there as it is apparently fraught with gypsies) paid off, as we enjoyed a water overload in Ibiza – the pool and the sea just a five-minute walk away, a foam party (although by the time we’d made it into the complex and queued for the cloakroom, the foam had been and gone) and a truly amazing water party in Es Paradís, where, to the audio cue ‘I’m singing in the rain’, a huge fountain with a geyser in the centre let loose 80,000 litres of water, flooding the dance floor and turning it into a gigantic pool where the water reaches up to chest-height. It truly was an experience like no other, and one I shall not be forgetting in a hurry!
-The beaches. Although the vast quantity of naked old people was rather disconcerting (when one bent over to straighten out their towel, the nausea from my hangover earlier in the day almost returned in full force), having a beach just five minutes away from the hotel was heavenly. On the third day, we went to a beach party at Bora Bora, which required more sneaking of Malibu, but in a much sneakier fashion than on the ferry (the fine for participating in a botellon on the island is extortionate). However, the best beach that we visited was one on the island of Formentera, a short boat trip away from Ibiza. Despite travelling on a choppy sea mid-hangover (we’d had to get up at 10am in order to make the trip) being absolutely ghastly, we realised very quickly after arriving that our suffering had not been in vain. The white sand and the five different shades of blue visible in the sea; the yachts floating serenely on the rippling, crystal clear water and the brilliant sun – it all added up to paradise. The water was so clear that we could see schools of fish swimming close to the shore. It was like living in a travel brochure for a day – the only thing that ruined it slightly is that I fell asleep on my side in the 35°C sun for an hour, which resulted in the two halves of my body resembling the colour scheme of a ‘Where’s Wally’ T-shirt.
-The world-famous clubs. Despite the first night out turning into a bit of a disaster – we spent an entire hour in the queue getting crushed by the crowd, we didn’t manage to get a drink even though we waited for 40 minutes at the bar and even our hunt for drunk food was a bit of a fail, as the burger bar next door had run out of burgers – the rest were incredible and 100% up to Ibiza standard. Eden, Privilege, Es Paradís, Bora Bora and Space: swimming pools surrounding the DJ booth, trees, fountains, sand and sea. CanCan and Fruity will never be the same again.
-The bird and the lizard. Not an adaptation of Aesop’s beloved fable but a gruesome reality on our balcony. A sweet little bird brought us the monstrous gift of a dead lizard, which was left upside-down on our terrace with its intestines spilling out every which way. I shall no longer be complaining of our lack of balcony in Alcalá.
So, despite the burger bar with no burgers and the foam party with no foam, nothing else was missing from the trip – sun, sea, sand, a bunch of great, fun-loving people and enough alcohol to make even Amy Winehouse’s liver hurt – I really couldn’t have asked for more. Ibiza 2011: the holiday of a lifetime!
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