The hotel was great (the picture shows the indoor courtyards), the weather was perfect, there were flowers in profusion and the travel arrangements all went smoothly. The frogs were very vociferous in the hotel ponds and I wish I had brought my tennis raquet with me to take advantage of the dozen or so courts within the hotel grounds. I’m afraid that I did watch an Abba tribute act which then became a Boney M tribute act. Had nothing better to do.
I had been invited to give a talk and actually the rest of the conference was quite interesting as I can probably use what I learned there in one of the projects I am now suddenly in charge of. The conference was about peer mentoring and one of the projects had been about a Welsh secondary school which had trained some of its older pupils to be mentors to students from a local school for the mentally disabled. So people from both those groups were also at the conference which I thought was a great experience for them. There were also young peer mentors and mentees from Ireland and Portugal.
There were also about 5 students from Swansea FE college (Gorseinon) to help with the conference organising. They were the same type of students I used to teach in Cheltenham. I asked one of them how they had chosen who went on the conference and he replied it was simply those with the highest grades.
Before Mallorca I had been to a 2 day conference in Northern Denmark about IT developments. I forgot my coat in the hotel wardrobe and thought that was the end of it. But they sent it back to me free of charge so I don’t have to buy a new one after all which I’m very grateful for.
Now it is the Easter holiday and we have no specific plans about what to do during this week.