Ibiza

I'm gonna start by saying this.. Ibiza was completely different to what I expected, (I think better to be honest.) To put it in perspective, we went to Ibiza and we only went to one club, for around 5 mins. But hey. Plenty of time to go back.

Right, we arrived in the morning at some point and caught a bus into our hotel. The first thing we noticed was the seemingly deserted streets we were driving through, but thought little of it. Checked in and business, then went for a bit of a wander into town to get ourselves some B&C. (Thats bread and cheese for the uninitiated of you.) We were pretty happy to find that the food and alcohol was all substantially cheaper than in Barcelona! And we'd been told it would be expensive...

Don Simon, €1.21 a box!

The next few days were pretty uneventful, we went for a few walks around town trying to find people that spoke english well enough to befriend, but were unsuccessful, and went for a massive trek down Platja d'en Bossa (the main beach in Eivissa town) checked out some kite surfers, and then wandered back through the club district, which had all been closed since September. We did stumble across this huge department store thing in the middle of nowhere, that sold a really weird combination of stuff, and had a huge off season sale on the go, but that was about that. I bought some jandals.

The beach in front of our Hotel

The weather was good though, and I was quite enjoying the chilled out nature of the stay after the sangria fueled hangover that was Barcelona... haha. We even managed to go for 2 whole days without touching a single alcoholic drink! Thursday rolled around, and we were joined by Canada and Rob from Barcelona, and things began to pick up in excitement a tad.

That night, me and Rob were sitting on the beach playing guitar and waiting for the bar to open so he could head into Canada's room and crash without paying for it (don't worry, it makes sense to me), and this dog comes over and starts barking at us. We then strike up a conversation with the owner, and he's an English guy that's been living in Ibiza for the past 3 years. Turns out he's a bit of a muso, and he produces techno music in a home studio just around the corner from our hotel. Now Rob has done a bit of recording himself, he's been gigging etc in Cornwall for a while with his own stuff, and one thing leads to another, and next thing we know, we're heading to Andreas' house a couple of days later to do some recording. Namely a song that Rob has written while travelling and he has ready for recording. By the way, check out Robs myspace page for interest if you want, it's www.myspace.com/RobFoulsham. More on this music business later..

The Friday was our clubbing experience, however brief. We chilled out on the beach for most of the day, had a meal in the hotel restaurant, and then proceeded to get into a few drinks in our room.

Ice + Beer + Sink = Fridge

Played a few drinking games which ended up in me running down the stairs, through the reception and down the street in my undies. Twice. I'm an unlucky bastard. We headed into this club called Somni just after midnight. Walked in, it was dead, and the drinks were 9 euros a pop, so we walked back out again.

Back at the hotel we cranked a bit of music, and continued with the drinking. At about 2 oclock, the night manager comes up to our room without warning, knocks on the door, and then proceeds to start shouting at us in Spanish. "Habla Inglese?"
"NO, NO INGLESE!" and then more Spanish shouting. In his defence, we were being quite loud, but if the guy had come up and told us earlier, quietly, then we would have headed outside to the beach or something. But anyway, we got kicked out for the night, and Canada had his sound system confiscated. So we thought, maybe the club has picked up, and headed back along. It hadn't, so we went home, and to bed. luckily we got let back into the hotel.

The next day was a bit of a hangover day, so not much got accomplished. When evening rolled around we headed along the coast a bit and up onto a point to check out the sunset with a few beers. Probably the best sunset I've ever seen from up there. On the way over we were stopped by a guy outside a bar right opposite our hotel, he saw my little guitar and called us over to tell us that he had a live band playing that night, and we should come check it out. After the sunset we headed back to the hotel for a few drinks with a plan to head there and then onto a club of some sort.

Mint sunset from the cliff top.

More sun setting

A few drinks turned into a fair amount of drinks, from a makeshift bowl of sangria we made up... we didn't get to this bar until about half an hour after the band had finished. But the bar was really cool, it seemed like it was a family owned place that was opened purely to provide a place for the owner and his mates to have a few drinks on the weekend.

Bowl of Sangria anyone??

We bought a few drinks, and had a yarn to the other people in the bar, and then proceeded to have free shots poured for us. Then I decided, for some reason, that I wanted a whiskey and dry, but there wasn't any dry, so I had it on the rocks. The owner proceeded to free pour me about half a bottle into a glass, and charged me 4 euros. This was the end of my night.

The next day was pretty uneventful, we kept it pretty quiet after the night beforehand. The day after, we were planning on heading over to the other side of the island to check it out. Looked into a couple of options, and it turned out that to hire a car for the day was only gonna be 40 euros, so we went for that option. Europcar provided us with a Seat Ibiza (nice one!) and we headed over to see a few sights. Heres some photos for ya...

k, didn't quite take as many photos as I thought we did on the drive day. Too bad, you'll have to come see for yourself...

We got back about 5ish, and me and Rob went to meet up with Andreas to do some recording. We were there for about 4 hours, and I learned a heap about the kind of equipment you need, the capabilities of software, a few different methods etc. We also recorded a couple of my songs live just so I could hear my voice through a set of good mics, and this also taught me heaps. If you want to hear it, I set up a myspace page with the recording on it... I'm still a little undecided as to whether I should be telling people about it, but screw it. www.myspace.com/adamlucasnz
It's pretty rough, cos it was live and the first take, and I think the guitar could be a bit louder, but it was a learning process more than anything else. Exciting stuff for me though.

Anyway, the last day we went for a bit of a trek through the old town, a big walled city just above the cliff where we watched the sunset. Was a real cool place, highlights included condom hill, a hill with a little track through it that was just littered with condoms, and crack hotel, which was an old building that had been boarded up and had a whole lot of junkies living in it... haha.

Crack hotel

And then we flew back to London, and here I am. How depressing and cold. haha. My plan at this stage is to look for a live in bar job for the winter, and save up for some more sweet travel next year.

And thats all folks! for now..