1995 Gran Canaria: A Tour Around Yumbo

Now you've seen how I spend my days. In my last web report I mentioned the the Canarian air. Eivissa is sub-tropical, but Gran Canaria is tropical. The air is hot and dry, and the smells of tropical plants is very different than the dusty smell of Eiviscenco fauna. The sounds are very different too. In Eivissa I was in a small town, far away from tourists. Playa del Inglés is the center of all tourist activity in the Canaries.

With this in mind I've chosen to take you on a short tour of a huge shopping complex called - appropriately enough - Yumbo. When I was here last Yumbo was just a big hole in the ground. And I mean big. Yumbo takes up an entire city block, but instead of an enclosed above-ground mall (as is typical in the USA), Yumbo is an open-air submerged mall. Four levels of stores are built into the walls of the hole and their doors and windws look outward to the children's playground in the center. The west entrance is the main one:

Immediately to my right as I walk under the neon elephant is a church with two pyramids atop it:

My original plan was to describe the large number of stores by counting them, or with some clever analogy, but my plans all paled when faced with the directory for one level of Yumbo:

There are a lot of stores here, but many of them are redundant. The most common daytime businesses are the jewelery and electronic stores, followed closely by cosmetics and perfumerias, then the restaurants, souvenier shops and the money-changers (more about them later), and lastly, the supermarket, the hardware store, etc.

By necessity, Yumbo (in fact all of Playa del Inglés), is multi-lingual. One of the saddest costs of "progress" has been the utter destruction of the local tourist culture. Ten years ago one needed to have a phrase book handy in order to communicate with the locals. To my mind that added a nice flavor to travelling. (I mean, why bother travelling if you don't partake of the local culture?) These days every shop-keeper, every clerk, every bathroom attendent and cleaning woman (rarely man) speaks almost fluent (but accented) tourist German, and many speak passable English. (As a matter of principle I speak nothing but my fractured Spanish, to the amusement of the locals and sometimes to my surprize (I orderded that!?!). Here is one particularly good sign advertising multi-lingual services:

There are two major evening businesses: the stores and restaurants I've already mentioned are one, nightclubs are the other. Ten years ago people who prefered the company of the same sex were "homosexuals", and rarely identified here. Now they're "Gay" with a capital 'G'. They've discovered Playa del Inglés, and the locals have discovered that the Gay community has disposable income. This has resulted in the opening of a great many clubs that target (but do not exclusively cater to) the Gay community. A Gay nude beach has been created where the straight nude beach was ten years ago; the latter has been moved to give the former some room.

The Gay nude beach looks just like the Castro on a party evening, complete with leather-boys and the other uniforms of coming out. The restaurants advertise with cute names (again like the Castro). A good example is the following (say it phonetically):

Get it? "Sin city." The locals - Roman Catholics all - used to have a problem with homosexuals (as I recall), but they've come to some sort of understanding when dealing with Gay money.

Not all Gay establishments are as subtle or subdued as Cincitta. Here's the entrance to another store, just around the corner:

Interestingly, the American custom (or did we get it from someone else?) of naming Gay nightclubs with the name of a color and an animal (especially if there's a double entrendé), as in The Blue Oyster or The White Swallow, isn't followed here. The names are rather tame, unlike my favorite double entrendé names in San Francisco: The Pendulum, Cock-a-doodle-do, Hot 'n Hunky.

It's not that Yumbo is a Gay mall, but rather that there's a friendly interaction between Gay and Straight communities here. The Gay stores and nightclubs are a minority, in fact, but the majority are so similar and so unimpressive that in general they bear little comment. A few that target the Straight community do bear mentioning, one is the Plane Club, which is designed to look like an airplane hanger, complete with curved roof and an airplane on top!

I can get to a spot above the airplane and present you with a panoramic look at Yumbo. The middle of the picture is north.

Before I leave Yumbo - it's midday, it's hot (33 C, 91 F), and I'm tired - I'll stop by a tourist shop that specializes in handmade tiniff (Yiddish, little knicknacks) and in an electronic shop to get another set of NiCad rechargable batteries. The store is Foto Tina; the owner (shown here) is a great story-teller, and I visit with him from time to time to compare notes about our cultures (he's from India), our perceptions about change (we've both seen the last twenty years of "progress" on Gran Canaria), and miscellaneous goings-on (like celebrating Indian New Year's Day with strong black coffee and a sweet cake (not unlike the Japanese manju bean paste cakes)). Mmmmmmmmm.

Here's the proprieter of Foto TIna, where I get all my film, battery chargers, and absolutely everything else even remotely associated with electronics. [Sorry, the full-size original has gone missing. --M]

Foto Tina

Have you found errors nontrivial or marginal, factual, analytical and illogical, arithmetical, temporal, or even typographical? Please let me know; drop me email. Thanks!

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