Sunday, July 15, 2018

Aquathlon?

Still relatively cool here. I went out for a run this morning and they were setting up what looked like a transition zone for a triathlon:

 Turns out it was an "aquathlon" put on by the city. It's a 2.5K run, a 600M swim, and a 2.5K run. The run part was in the Triana neighborhood.

The swim was on the river:

 The winner of the unranked class here crossing the line:
 We didn't stick around for the "pro" group race which followed.

This afternoon, Laura and I walked north along our side of the river for the first time. This is called "The Alley of the Inquisition" which, of course, nobody expected. It's only about a block from our flat and if you look closely, you can see the river through the other end:
 Along the way, there were stairways that went right down to the river. Here's a view of our bridge (the best bridge) from one of them:
 The buildings along the river were pretty. This one has a nice flowering bush growing in front:
 Here's a tour boat coming under the next bridge north along the river. They just go up and down the river all day:
 The graffiti under that bridge is pretty elaborate:
 This is the underside of the span as it goes across the river:
 Continuing north, you start to enter a long stretch of elaborate but abandoned structures. According to Palma, they were all built in the years leading up to the Sevilla Expo '92, sadly it's all in a state of decay. The site is known as Isla de la Cartuja, though it's not really an island. Doing the math, I guess it was a celebration of the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus. That voyage started here in Sevilla.

There are some places that are still in use. For example, this ceramics factory:
 and its kilns:
 Further along, it gets wild again. Like this patch of cactus:
 and this politically charged graffiti:
 and this weird abandoned circular collection of basketball courts:
 Near the end of the trek north, we encountered an active engineering college. In front was this massive electrical generator:
There's also an active amusement park complete with roller coaster:

Laura continued walking. I found a Sevici bike station and grabbed a bike and rode home.

The world cup was a bit of a disappointment with France crushing Croatia.

My time is so flexible here, it's been a bit of a challenge staying on task mathematically. I'm trying a new strategy this week where each day I write down one specific goal for the day and work to achieve that goal. Tomorrow my plan is to work on the "breast cancer" data set from the scikit-learn python library and do at least two machine learning methods on it with PCA pre-processing. Wish me luck!