Palma, Majorca
December 1st, 2024
Our first port! The weather didn’t look so promising in the early morning light, but it was fine by the time we were ready to disembark and join our Jewish Majorca tour booked with Dani Rotstein.
Our guide was Denisse and the first part of the tour was a walking tour of the Jewish quarters of Palma.
We learned about the history of the Jews in Majorca, and about the Xuetas who are descendants of Majorcan Jews who were conversos (forible converts to Christianity) and Crypto Jews who were forced to keep their religion hidden. What a sad and amazing history. It was very moving.
After the tour we walked to the cathedral
and could see our next destination, the Castell de Bellver
We didn’t go into the castle
But did see the magnificent views over the city.
It was time for a bathroom break, but that didn’t happen.
The public restrooms are only open on Tuesdays through Saturdays, so as It was a Sunday (probably the most popular day for visiting the castle) they were closed. Go figure.
Luckily the restaurant where we were to have lunch was only half an hour away, and we felt sure they would have an open restroom.
It was a very pretty drive from the seaside city of Palma up into the hills to the village of Valldemossa.
The restaurant where we had lunch, Es Taller, did not disappoint in terms of bathroom facilities and food.
The 4 of us ordered tapas to share. Each dish was unusual and delicious. It was a great choice.
After lunch we wandered around the village and then joined our driver for our return trip back to the ship.
It was a wonderful tour – highly recommended.
We got another great view of the cathedral from the ship.
We have a goal of walking a million steps on this cruise. We are off to a good start, over 12,000 today. However, I am missing the Queen Mary 2’s promenade deck. We tried walking around deck 5, but it is just not the same. We could walk around deck 9, but that is also not much of a walk. Maybe we will just have to walk all over the ship several times a day. This all sounded too complex to me, so I retreated to our suite to check out the days photos.
It was dark by the time we sailed away. We had a good view of the castle.
But I didn’t hear us blow our whistle. We didn’t blow it yesterday either. I hope this is not going to be a trend. We have a sea day tomorrow, maybe we will hear the whistle at noon. Fingers crossed.
We decided to try the Restaurant for dinner. We were escorted to a great table for 2 by the window. The food was excellent and apart from a few blips in service, things went better than last night.
After dinner I went up to the shops where there was a scarf tying demonstration. I love wearing scarves and am always eager to learn new ways to wear them.
This demonstration came with a glass of champagne, yay! The scarves they were using were a new line that they are carrying in the shop. They are very beautiful, and huge. I mean you could wear them as a pareo, at a price significantly greater than my well traveled batik one purchased on the beach in Tahiti many moons ago.
Still we had fun trying out all of the different ways to wear them. They were not cheap, $375 each. If we had a lot of on board credit I would be tempted to buy one, but it looks like our OBC is going to have to go towards upgrading our wifi package alas.
We get a free standard package, but this is really only good for surfing the internet, reading emails, and posting my blog. Brian has some upcoming Zoom meetings and needs to access Google Docs. It looks like in order to do this you need the upgraded package, which would be over $1,700. So it looks like we will need to go this unfortunately.
After the scarf demonstration it was time for the evening show. Tonight we were treated to the vocal talents of Ricardo Alonso.
I do like the fact that the shows are at 9:15. I am used to shows at 10:30 on other ships, and often find it hard to stay awake through the whole show. No worries about that tonight. Especially as he sang some Queen songs, that always keeps me awake!
So we have visited our first port of many. It has been a wonderful day – I am already feeling very much at home on the Sojourn.
Was your tour privately arranged? We’ll be there on Virgin in October.
Yes it was private. We arranged it through Dani at Jewish Majorca (jewishmajorca.com). You can chose to just do the 2 hour walking tour, but they will also add general tours of Majorca which we chose to do.