El ferry y el mareo — The Ferry and Seasickness

Getting to the islands, and what to do about the crossing

The Balearics are reachable by air in under an hour from the mainland and by ferry in six to nine, and the ferry is what people take when they want a car on the island — which, outside Palma, is close to essential. Services run from Barcelona, Valencia and Dénia, some of them overnight with cabins, and between the islands themselves. The Canaries are a different proposition altogether: they are around a thousand miles from the peninsula, so flying is the only sensible way there, though inter-island ferries are frequent and cheap. A word about the crossing itself, because the Mediterranean is not always calm. The stretch between the mainland and Mallorca can be rough in winter, and services are cancelled outright in a temporal — the word from lesson 68. If you are prone to seasickness the practical advice is what Sofía gives and what every Spanish grandmother gives: stay on deck rather than below, look at the horizon rather than at a screen, sit amidships rather than at either end, and take the tablets before you board rather than after you feel unwell, because once the mareo has started they do very little. Biodramina is the brand you will be sold in any Spanish pharmacy, and the pharmacist will ask whether you want the kind with caffeine, which stops it sending you to sleep. On the language, one observation worth carrying beyond this lesson. The se me construction is not a grammatical curiosity, it is a habit of mind, and Spanish uses it far more readily than English uses anything comparable. A speaker who says rompí el móvil is confessing; one who says se me rompió el móvil is reporting. Neither is dishonest — the second simply declines to make the event about intention — and once you notice it you will hear it constantly: se me hizo tarde, se me fue el santo al cielo, se me ha ido la cabeza. Learning to use it makes your Spanish sound markedly less translated.