Pimientos de Padron

Those small green peppers, fried and salted with coarse (sea)salt, make at excellent starter or snack. Actually, this picture is to (hopefully) catch your attention, I just wanted to mention a couple food-related observations.

First - the best value for money for good quality authentic food on Lanzarote we found in Bodega Rubicon, In La Geria wine-making region. I will post some photos of this very odd place later. I can't comment on the quality of their wine, their main produce, since I was the driver, but their small restaurant served us an excellent meal.

Second, long overdue mention - small restaurant Ureka (yes, not Eureka) in Santa Ponsa, Mallorca, where I tried those peppers first. It is a small place, and you find it at the end of the row of restaurants as you go from the beach toward the marina, somewhere here, maybe a little to the right, but on the same street. They serve excellent-value, simple but tasty food, like whole baked local fish and those peppers.

PS - and we bought a packet of those pepper seeds, so I will have a go growing them here

left behind

as far as I know, the scooters don't belong to the pair walking up the steps. but the accidental color-coordination created this impression of two pets* left behind when the owners went for a walk

* - (dogs, I guess, cats don't do that "look mournfully after" act as good

Pac-Man Graveyard

those strange sculptures are in Palma, sort of between the cathedral and the seafront. I didn't find them hugely interesting till Yuri suddenly came up with a name for the whole complex - Pac-man Graveyard. And yes, those things do look like big stone pac-mans that plummeted from the sky and got stuck in the pavement.

not that Yuri played a lot of it, but at least one episode in Futurama features an appearance by both mr and mrs pac-man

what exactly did the sculptor meant remains unknown to me. and uninteresting, too

waka waka waka

nice doggy

we only had two full days on Mallorca, and we spent the first one in Palma. It is now out of season, and the cathedral-old town area is perfectly pleasant - not crowded narrow streets, little pretty graden with citrus trees and goldfish we stumbled upon, etc. Overall atmosphere is kind of generic Mediterranean. Once out of old town area, which is not very big, again, it reminds of many other places at once - Agherro and Malaga especially, at least for me, but obviously I haven't been everywhere.

Unexpected success with our kids was museum of modern arts, and that with us even not going inside it - they have some abstract sculptures outside. you also get a good view over the rooftops from what I think was city walls and now house some of the collection.

The cedar-cone structure behind Timur was outside too. I immediately (and wrongly) thought it was by Andy Goldsworthy, but no, it was by a different author - don't remember the name.

Little doggy was hanging around the cone, and wanted to make friends with Timur (as many dogs do). Timur got somewhat worried if the nice doggy was a stray, but with not one, but two collar on it, I guess it was very much owned by someone

Parakeets

there were quite a lot of those loud birds in the little pine grove by the beach in Santa Ponsa. The built complicated-looking nests in the branches, and were easily outnumbering ubiquitous pigeons. there was at least one restaurant named after them (restaurante papagayo), and local-looking people were feeding them - something different from what they fed pigeons, since each feeder attracted either pigeons or parrots, but not both together.

they were obviously not native to balearics, so I made a quick search just now. they are monk parakeets apparently, native to subtropics of Argentina. wikipedia article doesn't list balearics as a home to feral flocks. maybe I should go and correct it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monk_Parakeet

PS: I just did, but am not sure if the change will stay since I have no source of information that wikipedia would consider appropriate. reference to blog will probably be considered as spam