Post procession

The takedown of the procession areas started today:

I can't imagine it taking as long to take down as to put up, but I'll keep an eye on progress during our last week.

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I bought a bunch of postcards and have mailed a few each day to various folks. I should've done more of this throughout the year, but just didn't.

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I learned how to use Google's mapping API today. It's a bit more challenging than Mapbox. Also, less "free". Mapbox let's you use their API a lot before they start charging/limiting you. Google has pretty low free quotas. The two have their pros and cons, but I think I'm going to keep working with Mapbox for now.

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Laura managed to get nearly all of the leftover picnic food out of the house today by bringing it to school with her this afternoon and feeding it to the students and teachers. With so little time left, we're already trying to eat up all the random stuff in the house, so getting all of that extra food out was a plus.

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I talked to Jo-Anne for a bit this evening. She's "recovered" from the Spain trip and settling into summer in Michigan. Her book club is reading the Mueller Report. Sounds like interesting reading, but I'm not sure I have the stomach for it.

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The weather is getting a bit warmer here. There was a lovely sunset this evening:

Processing to picnic

This morning we got up and out "early" to see the Corpus Christi procession. The streets were quiet because it's a local (not national) holiday. Here is one of the pasos pausing under the portada (so many p's):

This is the Plaza de San Francisco that I've been showing pics of over the past several weeks as it was prepared for this.  There were crowds, but nothing like Semana Santa:

We moved down to the Cathedral to see a different part of the procession:

The crowds were a bit thicker. We encountered another paso as they were being taken out of the Cathedral at long intervals:

This is almost certainly my last procession in Sevilla (and there were many). But, you never know, one can always pop up when you least expect it.

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I submitted my revised paper. Hoping there aren't too many issues left to deal with as I go back and forth with the editor.

Recently, I've been playing around with mapping GPS data. I found out that one can download all of the GPS location data that Google has gathered about your phone so I did so and started looking at it. Using the pandas library in python, I loaded the data into a dataframe and resampled it into daily averages. I plotted my daily average locations on a world map. When I zoomed in on Walla Walla, I noticed a nice linear cluster of locations between my house (green dot) and my office (black dot). In retrospect, it's not surprising, but it is interesting to see it:

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Laura arranged a picnic in Parque del Alamillo up in the north of the city. She invited friends and teachers from her language school. She made a lot of good, Mexican-themed food. Since we don't have a car, we took an Uber up there and set it up before the guests arrived:

Later, folks arrived with their own, albeit smaller, contributions and we had dinner and conversation:

Until the sun went down and then some:

With less food to carry, we cleaned up and headed for the bus (instead of Ubering), but Beli and Alejandro offered us a ride in their car, so we had a much easier time of it. The gathering was a good exercise in Spanish for me.