Home Again

The sunrise out of the balcony on my hotel room I stayed in for the Retail Convention in Spain last week. We were in a pretty big hotel on the Marina in the city of Palma. Seeing the sunrise was a regular event, since were were scheduled to leave everyday at 8 or 9. We were also scheduled for "Dinners" which most of the time meant hor'dourves and wine until midnight or after, which made for a very tiring but very fun week.

This was the approach to the beach on the Sunday. Luckily, the girl I was traveling with had one of here friends from HQ take us to a beach about 45 minutes away from our hotel. The road leading up to it was very narrow, it would be a single car road for the US, but in Spain most people have tiny cars that could just barely pass each other going each way. Then there is a dirt parking lot, and you had to walk along a trail for a few minutes before getting to the actual beach.

I've never been on a beach as nice as this one. It was pretty crowded with locals and tourists. It made for an extremely relaxing day. It was a little overcast, but the day was still warm, and so was the water. It wasn't until halfway through this day that I finally felt like I was out of the country.

I didn't get a chance to take pictures or sightsee for the rest of the week, since we were all under a full schedule. There were around 75 managers and other retail affiliated folk attending the conference, which during the day was presentations, workshops, and a long lunch in between. For one of the dinners the company rented a catamaran, and we took it out on the sea, and into a bay where it parked and then the dancing began. I was pretty motion sick from the ride over the waves in the sea, but once we anchored it was pretty still. The rest of the night was dancing and drinks. The DJ played a lot of Italian and Spanish pop hits, which was fun at first, but tiring for the English and German speakers a couple of hours in. Everyone says that the Americans are supposed to be the loud and obnoxious ones. But soon after the music started the dancing and the half naked yelling and whistling Italian and Spanish contingent started whooping it up, we all discovered that the stereotype isn't necessarily true. In the words of one of the managers from the UK - "How often do you get the chance to attend an Italian wedding reception in the Mediteranean?" We also had a scavenger hunt as our teambuilding activity one afternoon, which took us over the mountains of Mallorca. We split up in 10 groups of about 7, and had to travel around to a couple of different towns and take pictures, collect items and all kinds of various scavenger hunt type things. It was a bit like a Real World Road Rules activity. Also pretty funny because the groups were divided so the different countries weren't grouped together so everything had to be translated from Spanish into English, and then into Italian. We did a lot of training and the days were pretty long, but all of the sitting in cold air conditioned rooms looking at power point presentations was made up for enjoying the events at night. It was an almost perfect balance, except for the complete lack of sleep throughout the week.