Monday, August 6, 2018

Don Quixote

In a massive effort of will, I did manage to run this morning. Once I got out there, I felt pretty good. It's always impressive to see the Sevilla city workers cleaning up the river area after (and even during) the weekends. I realized this morning that there's so much activity down by the river on the weekends, that without constant attention, the place would be a dump. Here they are hosing down one of the streets:
 I walked with Laura to her class this afternoon. Still super hot out there. On the way back, I noticed this statue of Miguel de Cervantes most well known for his novel Don Quixote:
 Not coincidentally, about 100 meters down the road is this bar:
Just for clarity, I don't think Cervantes has any special connection to Sevilla. On the same stretch I saw this shop selling flamenco dresses:
I stayed home out of the heat and worked on some data analytics. While Laura was in class, Mario dropped by with the final version of the lease for our flat for the remainder of our stay here in Sevilla. He and Palma have been so amazingly accommodating. Laura came home and co-signed the lease. Then we took the trash out and happened to run into Mario returning home from a trip to the store. He came up to the flat and we gave him the signed lease. In exchange, he gave us... frying pans:
He was concerned that the frying pans in the kitchen were too old and worn, so he purchased these new ones for us. Honestly, the old pans were fine, but this is the kind of person he is, he really wants to make sure the place is in good shape for us.

On a related note, Laura had a couple of CD-ROMS for doing Spanish language exercises kicking around the apartment. None of our computers has a CD-ROM drive, so we couldn't use them. Mario lent us a USB CD-ROM drive and we were able to rip the cd's to our computer. I managed to do that in the time between the lease drop-off and pick-up, so was able to return the drive to Mario this evening too.

Mario and his family are going to Germany for a summer-ending vacation. They'll be out of town for a couple of weeks. I think he's a little worried about us, but the place is in good shape and, even without a toolbox, we can fix or deal with anything that might go wrong (knock on wood).

I think I'm going to read Don Quixote.