Eyesight To The Blind: Youth drinking culture

On the same night as Alcúdia was celebrating the harmless Miss Drag parade, something else was being celebrated – something rather less harmless.

For some years, Puerto Alcúdia has been the location for a vast gathering of island youth, coming together at the end of the school year. In itself this may seem harmless enough, but the event has got completely out of control. It has become a massive botellón (street drinking party), accompanied by fights, vandalism, robberies; one played out on the beach and around what is the main “local” night area, that of the Magic Centre.

Organised with the aid of Facebook and other social networking sites, the “party” is not all bad news. It does, after all, bring to Alcúdia a fair amount of business. But it degenerates as the night goes on. Arrests and injuries follow.

With ages ranging from 14 to 18, the Alcúdia school-end bash gives lie, once more, to the absurd argument that Mallorcan and Spanish youth have a respect for alcohol and do not engage in the level of anti-social behaviour that their British counterparts do. This is a view perpetrated by some visitors but also by some Brits who live locally and who either haven’t a clue what life is really like outside their make-believe, expattery “paradise” worlds or who would rather not know, preferring to justify their existences in the “paradise” worlds by ignoring what goes on or by pulling the ah, but it’s all so much better here, it’s just a small minority and the UK is so much worse line. Sorry, but it’s only partially true. One reason why things seem much worse in the UK is that there are an awful lot more people to make them worse.

Perhaps the main difference, though, is that – for the holidaymaker or resident -trouble from events like the botellón is easily enough avoided. They tend to be confined to certain areas, while rarely do they give rise to the more British desire to have a go at anyone who might be in the vicinity. Random attacks on people in the streets are not unknown (a gay couple were attacked in Alcúdia recently, for example), but to over-emphasise them would be quite wrong; the streets are generally safe, so long as certain places are avoided at certain times.

Violence there is, and there were of course two deaths early in the season last year, but it isn’t extreme and is just as likely, more likely perhaps, to occur within the confines of certain hotels and to be solely the action of holidaymakers (and not just the British). However, the drink (and drugs) element, among local youth, cannot be brushed aside as though it were not an issue, as it most certainly is. One wishes, once and for all, that some would remove their tinted-the-turquoise-of-sea Raybans and see local society for what it really is. But they won’t, because they need justification and also a need to lambast a home country for societal ills that they pretend do not exist in Mallorca. They are blind. Deliberately and delusionally.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Ashes To Ashes

It should probably come as no real surprise that young (and not so young) tourists rock up in Mallorca for a bit of a bundle, or at least find themselves involved in bundling. “The Diario” reports on a study by the “European Journal of Public Health” which, taking data from summer 2007, finds that one out of ten young tourists (defined as those between 16 and 35) ends up in a fight or is attacked. Perhaps the surprise is that the number is not higher. 

 

The study compared the situations in Ibiza and Mallorca and found that violence is twice as likely to occur in Mallorca. Maybe that’s because more tourists are stoned in Ibiza, where the consumption of drugs is higher. Despite the British origins of the study, it does not confine itself to British tourists; three groups were considered – Brits, Germans and Spanish. No conclusions seem to be drawn in respect of different nationalities; they are equally capable of getting paralytic and out of their heads. Indeed, this is a major reason for the holiday, during which the levels of alcohol and drugs imbibed and taken are higher than they would be “at home”. In something of the bleeding obvious but with a rather bizarre description of differences, fights are more likely to occur in places with cheap booze, easy pick-ups and loud music as opposed to those with an “agreeable” atmosphere and “clean toilets”. 

 

What may be interesting about all this is the fact that violence, heavy drinking and drug abuse is not the preserve just of the Brits but also of the Spanish. One comes back to this rather misguided impression that many have of the civility and respect among Spanish youth when compared to their British counterparts. It is a bit of a myth, and this study seems to confirm this. Recently, there was another study, one of Spanish university students, conducted by the Galician university of Santiago de Compostela. It was interested in discovering the impact of alcohol and substance abuse on memory and attention, but it also found a significant number of students to be pretty much chronic alcoholics or those who would take on-board copious amounts at the weekends. Sounds rather familiar in terms of binge drinking, does it not? Furthermore, it should also come as no surprise to anyone familiar with student campuses in the UK to realise that Spanish students are as capable of getting tanked up as those in the UK. 

 

But just to come back to the drinking and fighting clans of youth tourists, last year there was another study, one from the European Commission. It found that 12 per cent of Brits got into a scrap, mainly in “places of night entertainment” (with or without clean toilets, it wasn’t made clear), and that the Brits were indeed league leaders in the bundling stakes. So the Spanish still have a way to go, it would seem.

 

Meanwhile over in Sa Pobla …

 

 

Los Ashes

On Saturday evening there was the now traditional annual open-air supper in numerous streets of the town, but there were greater festivities on Sunday evening when the “Palmy Army” at the SPCC (Sa Pobla Cricket Club) celebrated England’s famous Ashes victory with the now equally traditional burning of a potato, the remnants of which are deposited in a small terracotta urn (available from all good souvenir shops) on which is scratched “los Ashes” (there is some discussion as to whether the Mallorquín usage “els” should be used instead of “los”). The association between the SPCC and The Oval, scene of England’s victory, is short but memorable, marked by one member of the SPCC who made a pilgrimage to the ground, couldn’t find it and asked, with poor pronunciation, for directions to “The Offal”. The president of the SPCC has sent his warm wishes to England’s captain who can be assured both of a cheery welcome when he is next in Sa Pobla and of a bowl of eels. We understand that he is yet to take up the offer. Well done and play up, England, say the gentlemen of the SPCC.