Soller, Mallorca in August 2021

My family friends from Formentera rented this house again, in the middle of the Unesco World Heritage mountain chain of Tramuntana, where I was invited to join like I did already last year in august, because I could not get a flight from Brazil to Germany due to travel restrictions. I had arrived from rainy and winterly Rio de Janeiro after around 28 hours with numerous PCR tests and travel documentations with QR codes, and jumped directly into the salty watered pool between the black and the white Tchaikovsky swans from the kids. The only visible plastic items to be seen around, by the way, as the rest is fully integrated in the landscape. Everything is made out of natural stone, iron or wood.

What an amazing place to spend quarantine at! No need to go somewhere anyway as it’s tourist peak season and I had everything desirable up there. One has to drive up to the house on a super narrow and adventurously steep serpentine road in first gear only, avoiding to either scratch the car or fall down the mountain with it.

I was better off on a hike up the mountains after drinking lots of coffee with an added dopamine pill from my prescriptioned pill box I bought three years ago to be used in such occasions. It worked out quite well and I was able to move properly for a couple of hours as if nothing had occurred and I enjoyed so much the sweet suffering of sweating, heavy breathing, aching and then finally running down agile and fragil after inhaling the spectacular views, all on my own. At arrival by the house, the dopamine pill had lost its power and I limped to the pool, where my super sporty friends had arrived already as they had done more of a trail run than hike, which I definitely could not keep up with.

Best thing of all was to spend real quality time with those friends and their kids, including BFF time with Tamsin. The days were spent mostly on the pool, on the terrace, in the woods, in the kitchen or in the only place available with WiFi connection, to work, stuck away in an extra room in the garden with unbearable heat. We had to set up turns for our conference calls as there was only space for one person.

The turning and shifting was followed in the bed situation inside and outside the house as we were just too many people. One night I fell asleep beside the pool on cushions on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, observing the beautiful sky filled with stars.

The one duty I was very clearly excluded from was the cooking turn because my friends are all passionate foodies with amazing cooking and baking skills. I would have totally ruined it.

Well fed, tanned and happy I left to the airport, having finished the obligatory quarantine , just to start the next one in Berlin.