Today´s exciting news: The socks are dry! :-)
It´s pretty darn humid here. I brought a portable clothes line, some Tide, and a little nail brush, and thought I´d cleverly wash a few things here and there so we wouldn´t have to do whole loads of laundry. I didn´t know it would take THREE DAYS for things to dry. I´m not sure jeans would ever actually dry out here.
Everything else went well today, too. We drove to Palma, which took some courage. I sure miss London´s trains and tubes! It was a challenge first just finding our way to the freeway. But Mandy had given me great directions to the parking garage nearest the cathedral, so we made it there just fine. We toured the cathedral, and I was so glad to see it, and to have the girls see it, since we didn´t end up seeing one in London. This one was HUGE and impressive. It was started in 1230 and took about three hundred years to complete. Amazing.
Then we met Mandy, and she gave us a wonderful walking tour of the city. She pointed out lots of wonderful buildings, telling us interesting things about them. We saw a tiny cheese and sausage shop. We watched street performers in a market square, and bought handcrafted souvenirs there. I was amused to see that the market square looked exactly like a huge place I´d seen indoors in Las Vegas.
We went to lunch at the place with the vine-covered archway, which is where John Lennon wrote the song, Imagine on a napkin. Very cool! Lunch was an experience, with good bread and paella, and Alaina had some roasted pork which was absolutely delicious. Mandy´s husband and two friends met us there, and then we all wandered a bit more, and had some ice cream. There´s an ice cream place on just about every block, and it seems to be something you get every day here. YUM.
However, we´ve noticed one thing over and over, and that´s the smaller portion sizes, both here and in England. When you order a¨"cafe descafinado de macina con leche" (decaf coffee from the machine - not the powdered stuff - with milk), you get about five ounces in a glass. And if you order two kind of ice cream, they do half a scoop of one and the other half of the other. They have tiny bowls for dessert in the buffet. The girls and I talk about it quite a bit, how you go into Starbucks in the U.S., and you can´t even buy a small cookie, just a huge one. They agree that from now on, if they get a cookie there, they´ll share one. And we´ll pay closer attention to portion sizes.
After lunch, we went to the literature class that some of the homeschooling kids go to once a month. It was all in Spanish. Some of the kids shared stories or poetry they´d written, and Alaina told them about her play (in Spanish). She did great!
Then we went to the same park from two days ago, and the kids ran around for a long time while we had coffee. It´s so different for me to be with people who can have a late lunch around 3 and then just hang out relaxing for hours. Very nice! Mandy and Marina spoke Spanish, and I paid close attention, speaking English when I wanted to join the conversation. It´s really fun feeling as though I can understand quite abit!
Mandy told me all about what it´s like to have free health care. Very interesting! I´ll talk more about that later, but right now it´s 11 p.m., and I only have 15 minutes left to upload images before my computer time runs out.
More tomorrow! We´re getting up early (around 8) so we can get to a market north of Palma. Then we´ll meet the homeschoolers later in the afternoon for possibly some beach time.
Kathy