north americans go to ibiza... or, a comedy of errors

R

ravyn

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it's been a little over two weeks since my wife and i went to ibiza for the first time, and i'm finally now getting around to posting a trip report - probably because the whole thing is rather laughable.

anyway... the trip started off on a less-than-auspicious note; i've not been sick all year but managed to get a cold the day before we left, so for the first two days of the trip i felt like complete shit. but that wasn't the worst of it. anyway...

day 1: get in late at night, cab it to the hotel royal plaza in ibiza town (i will not stay here ever again) and we check in. first thing we find is that our room has two single beds, not one large bed. this must be some sort of strange european thing, as we encountered the same problem when we went to london a few years ago. either that or we have horrible luck with hotels. my guess is the latter. anyway, about 4am we wake up to find that it's raining in our hotel room - go down to the office and try to explain this to the front desk guy who can't seem to understand it - he calls over the night manager who has a better grasp of english and we get him to come up to the room with us. well, after much running around it turns out that the guy in the room above us had a little too much to drink (or whatever else) and passed out - but didn't turn off his bathtub first, and he flooded most of the third floor. oops. yeah, so we got moved to a different room, a drier room, thankfully, one that even had a queen-size bed in it. ok, this is good.

day 2: walked around the harbor area of ibiza town, and went out that night to pacha for the perfecto closing party. according to this website, paul oakenfold was supposed to be there - but he wasn't there. so we paid 50 euros each plus 8 each for water to see pete tong and a couple of others i'd never heard of. overall, i have to say i wasn't impressed with pacha. snotty people, overpriced drinks and entry, and nothing that i would've associated with my mental image of what ibiza should be.

day 3: sleep. yeah, that's all. illness does that to a person.

day 4: at this point it starts to become apparent that the hotel staff likes to f*** with people. during the day, i asked one of the front desk people about good places for boat tours or diving, and was told that there weren't any because summer was over. ?!?!! that night, my wife asked for recommendations for a nice restaurant, one that serves chicken (since we're not big on seafood) and was given directions to KFC! yeah. well, anyway, we went out that night to amnesia to see tall paul and tiesto, and it was considerably better. better music, better people, better lights, better vibe. met a couple of english guys there on vacation and spent a few hours hanging out with them, and all was well. until, that is, my wife decided to get sick. yup, i'm feeling better and now she's getting ill.

so that more or less killed day 5 (friday), although this time when asking the hotel guys for directions we got sent to burger king, so maybe that's an improvement, and day 6, my wife spent sleeping all day while i walked down to playa d'en bossa just to say that i'd been to the beach. and of course, i see people out there on boats and jet skis and all the other water-type implements which supposedly didn't exist because, according to the aforementioned front-desk clerk, "summer was over." =/

last day (day 7)... didn't do much - and overall i'm thinking that the trip was a major disappointment - we'd planned to do a lot of different things on this trip - go to las dalias, go to a bunch of beaches, go diving, etc, etc, and here it is with less than 24 hours to go and none of these things happened. hell, we'd only gone out twice during the week, never made it to space at all. didn't even make it out of ibiza town to see the rest of the island. blah! well, at about 3am (our plane was leaving at 7:30am) we cabbed it over to eden for judge jules and the judgement sunday closing party. and although we were only there for about 2 hours, i'd say that those two hours were probably the best two hours of the whole trip. we met a couple of people standing in the guest-list line whose friends couldn't make it and instead invited us to go with them, so we didn't have to shell out ridiculous amounts of cash to get in. (thanks james and nicole, if somehow you read this message board!!) anyway... i'm not sure about when it was, but at some point during judge jules's set i was standing there and i just got overwhelmed (keep in mind that this night i'm also completely sober - no alcohol, no chemicals) with vibe and happiness. up until that point i was ready to go home, i'd had enough "fun" for one week - but then the music and the people and everything just hit me and it was a very magical sort of feeling which made me not want to leave. it figures that this would happen just before we have to head back.

anyway... it might seem by this post that overall i didn't really have a good time, because a lot of things went wrong and a lot of things that i was hoping to do didn't happen. but actually, i did have a good time and definitely want to go back next year - although there have definitely been some lessons learned....

1) don't stay at the royal plaza. in fact, if the goal is crazy party mayhem (which it was - we wanted to go over there and get nutty for a week), we should've stayed in san antonio. this was told to us by several people we met.

2) go with a larger group. that way, if someone gets sick or wants to sleep, everyone else can still go out and have a good time.

3) learn more spanish. many of the people we had to deal with who supposedly spoke english could do just that - speak english - but they didn't understand it very well when spoken back to them.

4) stay longer. a week just isn't enough time.

here's to next year.
--ravyn
 
sorry to hear you had a few implications on your trip!!

paul oakenfold was soppose to have palyed but didn't turn up, this has happened so many times, not just oakenfold but digweed aswell, this was a major point of the summer.

cu next year!!!
 
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