(From Brian and Lindsay)
Tuesday morning was our first real driving adventure of the trip (without gps) as we set out to find a specific Mallorcan pearl factory (though all we had was a vague map and the pearl factory was a dot in the middle). I have to note that I hate roundabouts so I was obviously very excited to find that almost every intersection outside of the main cities included roundabouts of 2 and sometimes 3 lanes. Lindsay, with two maps in hand, and reading every street sign she could find kept us on the right track until we reached the rough destination at which point we just circled around a bit until we happened upon the store. The massive pearl factory included many items that you won't find in the U.S.A., both cultured and natural pearls and a machine to make the jewelry. After shopping around awhile we both agreed that a necklace of flattened gray pearls which we had never seen elsewhere looked incredible on Lindsay and it needed to be rescued from the store.
We followed our shopping with some randomly chosen excursions by following road signs to the semi-major cities on the island. We stopped in Inca and cruised around their city center, looked in a few shops, took some photos, and had a nice relaxing time amid a more local feel than all of the tourist areas we had been visiting.
After Inca we “roundaboutted” our way back to the hotel. We changed rooms to one with a sea view and one larger bed but sadly no balcony. We then spent about an hour on the beach and then returned to our room to sample one of the bottles of wine from Barca. We opened the Torres Atrium and Lindsay deemed it her favorite of everything we had tried in Spain. The bottle went quickly as we watched the beginning of Spain vs Portugal and got ready to head out to dinner.
Walking down the street of our hotel it was instantly clear that there were indeed Spanish cities cared more about their national team than Barcelona did. There were no available seats at any of the restaurants so we stopped at a big cluster of restaurants which were full of locals cheering on their team. We decided to grab a drink until the game ended and seats became available. Not wanting to switch drinks, not having wine by the glass as an option, and bottles being so cheap we made the obvious decision to buy a bottle. Since we didn’t have seats we just stood on the sidewalk and enjoyed our wine. An empanada appetizer and standing room only bottle of wine made the game go by quickly and enjoyable.
When dinner became an option we landed at an Italian restaurant with a very entertaining waiter who made plenty of jokes and educated us on some local language tidbits. Apparently Mallorca has their own version of Catalan similar to how English is different in the states vs England. He encouraged us to order in Spanish and then read back our order in English throwing in a glass of whiskey into the list to screw with us. He also mentioned that we spoke Spanish with a French accent...that's a new one! We followed our meal with a return to the hotel terrace to spend more time taking in the view.
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