Mozart Heroes

Progress on the painting of the building directly across from ours continues:

It goes kind of fast when there are 3 people working simultaneously. It's looking good. They knock off around 2:30pm to avoid the hottest part of the day.

Laura has Spanish class every day from 4-7:30pm. I usually walk her to class over on the Sevilla side. It's interesting to walk the same route every day and look for new details. This time I noticed that many of the balconies on upper floors of buildings have palm front adornments. On the way home, I took pictures of a a variety of them and created this montage:

It seems natural that this is a common adornment. After all, there are a lot of palm trees here and you gotta do something with the dropped fronds. Also, being a predominantly Roman Catholic country, maybe these are palms from Palm Sunday. I know from my own Catholic upbringing that some folks save the palms from Palm Sunday service and hang them somewhere until the following Easter season. Some places even burn the dried palms from the previous year to create ashes for Ash Wednesday services.

I did some math on the research side today and developed an interesting idea. I did not do any machine learning. My job here is to do my own research and to develop an introductory machine learning course for the Whitman curriculum. Some days I do a little of both, some days I just do one or the other.

Laura is really good about finding things for us to do here in Sevilla. Last night she got us tickets to a two-man musical act from Switzerland called Mozart Heroes. One was billed as a rock guitarist, the other was a classical cellist. They mixed and merged their respective disciplines into a fun and enjoyable set. They have some lovely classical arrangements of Mozart, Vivaldi, and Bach for guitar and cello. Most of the classical pieces at some point would break or transition to pop and rock pieces including Metallica, AC/DC, Guns & Roses to name a few.

The crowd was into it and the performers clearly prepped for their tour through Spain. They played a Spanish pop tune that pretty much everyone in the audience sang along to (these guys didn't singe at all, just instrumentalists). It definitely killed though if I were advising them, I'd have them end the concert with that piece in future Spain shows.

The venue was the terrace of that Auditorio Rocío Jurado. This auditorium is up in the somewhat abandoned Expo '92 area. You can kind of see that that a lot of the grounds are not really maintained. The white building on the left is the auditorium proper. The grassy area is the channel of a canal that flowed through this area during the Expo but is now dry and overgrown:

A look in the other direction shows other unused buildings, some futuristic old exhibit buildings along with a mock-up of a European Space Agency rocket. I think an Ariane class:

You can also see the continuation of the overgrown canal between the building and the rocket.
The "terrace" is a small stage outside of this building with facilities and a bar:

It was well-attended:

Here's a bit of a sample of what we saw/heard. It starts classical and transitions to the Ghostbusters theme:

The obligatory band selfie (from their fb page):

We're in there somewhere, haha.