Thursday, December 13, 2018

Real Alcázar de Sevilla

While Laura was in class today, Taylor, Rachel and I went to Real Alcázar. Parts of this royal palace date back to the 12th century. It's the home of Spanish royalty when they are in Sevilla. The palace and the surrounding gardens are now open to public tours. You can see the age of the place in this wall juxtaposed with the well-manicured plants of the garden:


Following the rule of thumb to always look up when touring old buildings, I noticed this ceiling in one of the rooms around the throne room:


The weather was cool and breezy, but the sky was a brilliant blue. This is the courtyard outside of the throne room:


One of the rooms around the throne is known as the "doll room". Among all of the adornments in plaster, there are 4 discreet doll heads. We looked all over for them, but couldn't find them. Luckily, a couple of other folks in the room with us pointed them out:


The grounds are beautiful and really popped in the clear air. In the distance here is the water-powered organ:


We walked through maze:


You can see la Giralda over by the Cathedral peek up above the wall:


After the palace we walked over to Laura's school and headed to lunch. Laura wasn't quite ready to go with us, so we went on ahead. We saw this poor little dog shivering outside of a store waiting for their owner:


We walked out to Pizzería La Urbana for lunch. Taylor and I got adventurous and tried a local Sevillian beer. I thought it was OK, but oddly sweet. Taylor was not into it at all:


Try at your own risk. Here's Rachel and Taylor enjoying the meal:


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In the afternoon, I did a little math. I found an interesting paper relating machine learning in speech recognition to that of weather prediction. This is a relatively new approach and I'm looking forward to reading a bit more about it.

Taylor, Rachel and Laura went out to the local mall. I went out for a run. It was kind of nice in the cool breeze. On the way home, the sunset across the bridge was lovely:


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We ran through some leftovers this evening to which Laura added a nice salad. After clean up, we hit a local helado place for dessert. A busy day, yet also productive. Even did a load of laundry.