Bit pf a catch-up here, sorry.
More sun yesterday - wow this is soooo tiring! Lay by the pool for an hour again, then a little later sat on the beach while Steve swam enjoyably in the sea for a while, doing handstands! That is to say, he was doing handstands in the sea - I wasn't doing them on the beach...
Last night we walked further round than usual, to 'Es Passeig' restaurant. Apart from a German mother and her two unruly kids nearby all was good. We started with salads and I had spagetti while Steve had fish - as in a whole fish, baked. I've never been keen when fish is served with head and tail intact, and eating it is more a biology lesson disection exercise than a meal. Still, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
During the course of the meal my new green check shirt, already well-fitting, became tight, so now I am officially fat.
Despite the service being slow and us dragging the meal out as long as possible with dessert and coffees, we still found that Miguel Pastor was playing his merrie organe when we got back to the hotel, so we ordered cocktails and endured (and I do not use the word in any exaggerated sense) it for half an hour before going to bed where we could still hear him murdering various standards ('Please Release Me' springs to mind for some reason) as well as unknown Spanish compositions.
A word or two about birds. This morning while sitting out on the balcony just before the 0800 national anthem from the naval base (only the usually-efficient Spanish Armada* didn't play it until 0805 today) I watched three swallows (or were they swifts?) wheeling about, almost in formation like little jet fighters, catching insects before the heat of the sun. There are sparrows everywhere here: they hop onto the back of the chair next to you when you are eating a sandwich at an outdoor café, they flit around the hotel balconies looking for dropped crumbs, and I even watched one hopping along the beach yesterday. And they're noisy little buggers. Ducks here like the sea - a lot. We often see two or three bobbing along a few metres from the beach. In the dried up river you can see ducks, geese, seagulls and last night some weird bird (like a chicken or turkey yet with webbed feet). And when we went for a wander the other day to a great place up by the old church (now a museum) where you can sit and look out over the headland to the exit from the harbour, we watched a gull for probably five minutes wheeling about without flapping his wings even once, enjoying the air currents off the cliff face. I swear he was enjoying himself.
You can hail the tram right outside our hotel, and this morning we did so, and clattered our way into Sóller where we spent three hours or so having a coffee, a look around the shops, a longish (for us) walk through orange and lemon groves, some lunch including of course plenty of fresh local orange juice (Sóller's wealth is built on oranges), and then caught the tram back.
I may have mentioned this before, but when I was little I came to Port de Sóller with my parents on holiday from Paris, where we lived at the time. Way, way back in my memory I can recall visting a shop where Dad bought the large olive wood cheese board and fruit bowl they still use to this day. Now I think I found the same shop/workshop in Sóller, right by the tram terminus. On chatting to the nice lady inside I discovered it opened forty years ago (which would be about right) and the photograph of the then owner she showed me brought back more memories...
Oh, and when we arrived back at the hotel - joy of joys - the air-conditioning is on. Won't go lower than 21° unfortunately, but hey, it's air-con!
*Armada in Spanish just means Navy
More sun yesterday - wow this is soooo tiring! Lay by the pool for an hour again, then a little later sat on the beach while Steve swam enjoyably in the sea for a while, doing handstands! That is to say, he was doing handstands in the sea - I wasn't doing them on the beach...
Last night we walked further round than usual, to 'Es Passeig' restaurant. Apart from a German mother and her two unruly kids nearby all was good. We started with salads and I had spagetti while Steve had fish - as in a whole fish, baked. I've never been keen when fish is served with head and tail intact, and eating it is more a biology lesson disection exercise than a meal. Still, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
During the course of the meal my new green check shirt, already well-fitting, became tight, so now I am officially fat.
Despite the service being slow and us dragging the meal out as long as possible with dessert and coffees, we still found that Miguel Pastor was playing his merrie organe when we got back to the hotel, so we ordered cocktails and endured (and I do not use the word in any exaggerated sense) it for half an hour before going to bed where we could still hear him murdering various standards ('Please Release Me' springs to mind for some reason) as well as unknown Spanish compositions.
A word or two about birds. This morning while sitting out on the balcony just before the 0800 national anthem from the naval base (only the usually-efficient Spanish Armada* didn't play it until 0805 today) I watched three swallows (or were they swifts?) wheeling about, almost in formation like little jet fighters, catching insects before the heat of the sun. There are sparrows everywhere here: they hop onto the back of the chair next to you when you are eating a sandwich at an outdoor café, they flit around the hotel balconies looking for dropped crumbs, and I even watched one hopping along the beach yesterday. And they're noisy little buggers. Ducks here like the sea - a lot. We often see two or three bobbing along a few metres from the beach. In the dried up river you can see ducks, geese, seagulls and last night some weird bird (like a chicken or turkey yet with webbed feet). And when we went for a wander the other day to a great place up by the old church (now a museum) where you can sit and look out over the headland to the exit from the harbour, we watched a gull for probably five minutes wheeling about without flapping his wings even once, enjoying the air currents off the cliff face. I swear he was enjoying himself.
You can hail the tram right outside our hotel, and this morning we did so, and clattered our way into Sóller where we spent three hours or so having a coffee, a look around the shops, a longish (for us) walk through orange and lemon groves, some lunch including of course plenty of fresh local orange juice (Sóller's wealth is built on oranges), and then caught the tram back.I may have mentioned this before, but when I was little I came to Port de Sóller with my parents on holiday from Paris, where we lived at the time. Way, way back in my memory I can recall visting a shop where Dad bought the large olive wood cheese board and fruit bowl they still use to this day. Now I think I found the same shop/workshop in Sóller, right by the tram terminus. On chatting to the nice lady inside I discovered it opened forty years ago (which would be about right) and the photograph of the then owner she showed me brought back more memories...
Oh, and when we arrived back at the hotel - joy of joys - the air-conditioning is on. Won't go lower than 21° unfortunately, but hey, it's air-con!
*Armada in Spanish just means Navy
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