Diary written by: Bernt Pölling-Vocke ( bernty@gmx.com )

The waves serve as a pleasant background-noise, the clouds are hiding the sun and Frank lies at the beach just a couple of meters from me, reading a book while I am writing this "book", or diary, just as you wish...

It´s still rather early, 6 pm to be exact which is the result you get when you hit the road early in the morning (10 am) and once again get a hotel without any problems at all. Today´s hotel is a bit more expensive but it´s right at the beach and not booked-out, as some other places we asked before. They also told us at the hotel that everything was absolutly overflown with tourists until the last weekend but that the season was winding down rapidly from now on. No more nights at construction sites for us, we concluded. Guaranteed. Guaranteed? We will see...

Sant Antoni, the town we are staying in, probably has no more than 500 inhabitans in the winter but probably a lot more than 50.000 in the summer. The whole beach is stuffed with one hotel uglier than the other, most of them of the lowest category of course (which does not mean cheap, just low-quality). Obviously for some reasons everybody wants to be here in the sun and even crap sells for good money. I know that I slashed the campers more than they deserved during the last diary-entries but those people who suffer through their vacation in towns like this are probably even worse. Why should one spend a week or more in a town with absolutly no natural infrastructure, billions of tourists and nothing to see at all (besides water and sand and overcrowded hotels)? In addition to this it is also very annoying that the number of german tourists has increased dramatically ever since we entered Spain yesterday. When I am in another country I am just glad there isn´t a whole lot of typical german stuff&habits around me but here I get it all, plus the sunshine we don´t have in Germany. German tabloid press, german beers, german idiots, it´s all there, and a lot of it. There are also a lot of spanish tourists around, but the number of Germans is just mind-boggling. And they´re mind-boggling dumb in most cases. Not only for travelling 1500 kilometers by car in order to move into a prison-cell along the beach but also everywhere they show up. Need an example? At the supermarket an hour ago some germans bitched that they couldn´t understand the signs at the store, well, hello? Spain - Germany, spanish - german, this ain´t good old Germany even though the spanish people try to have everything as german as possilbe. Or at the cashier: basically every german customer creates a traffic jam at the cashier because he has to check every goddamn single item on the receipt. When you´re far away from home and have to pay sums of several thousand Pesetas you were being cheated for sure! You could also attribute the high total sums to the fact that a million Pesetas is just enough to buy you a bubble-gum but it´s always good to expect fraud everywhere...

I really hope that global warming becomes a reality and this dumb german tourists can have their Spain right at home in Germany, right at the beach in Berlin or Bremen where the north-sea would move if the temperatures would increase dramatically. We would only have to import some of those singing Spains who move from restaurant to restaurant at night and create an atmosphere of happiness, oh well, how good life in the south is...

The stage was another story today: absolutly terrific nature, some tough climbs through a desert-like area in the morning, another tough climb through a forest reminding me of a tropical forest in the evening at night and a fascinating flat area between. Pictures of the stage are all over this page, it was definetly one of the highlights so far even though it is really becoming hard to distinguish between all the highlights we had so far.

I will also finish writing now and move back to the hotel where Frank should be getting ready for a restaurant tonight. By taking a look at the people around I would say that some sandals, a worn-out t-shirt and a beer-belly would be just fine if you don´t want to appear suspicious. One could almost get a headache...

2nd entry of the day:

After a great dinner (a really bad, rather expensive pizza) we played some chess along the promenade. A couple walked by:

Man: Look, they´re playing chess!
Woman: So what?
Man: That´s fat! (this has become "cool" in Germany, you just call everything fat if your IQ is lower than 50 and it was just a good ending to a day in this miserable town in the middle of this great area (at least nature-wise), it was a fitting end, it was, well, just fat...

Oh: the Hero of the Day-award goes to Frank for repairing the bike of two boys when we entered Sant Antoni earlier today. Please stand up in front of your computer and applaud this heroic act...

Chess statistics:        Bernt vs Frank         3:15:1