When I went out for my run this morning the take down of La Velá de Triana was well under way. The stage was gone with just trash in its wake:
The temporary beer & tapas tents were mere skeletons of their former selves:
Not to worry though, the 6 billion other brick and mortar beer & tapas places will be open, business as usual, tonight.
Fun surprise, this morning we heard what sounded like a multi-piece brass band playing:
Turns out a few enterprising young brass players were busking out on the main street here. They were "doing it their way", with police approval, or at least police indifference:
They played for about an hour and were pretty good. God knows it's hard to find a good trumpet player.
After that, pretty typical day. Me math, Laura language school. This evening we went to Domino's of all places for pizza:
It was pretty good and not too expensive, just 6 euros for this medium pie that was enough food for Laura and me. We got drinks too, but we didn't really need to because outside the restaurant there is some "potable water":
We went home after dinner, but went back out to see the lunar eclipse. Lots of other folks here had the same plan. You can see them all lined up for the view along the bridge:
It was pretty. I managed few decent shots with my phone and its new tripod:
and:
From the day-late-and-a-dollar-short desk, here are last night's festival videos. Some traditional style Andalusian music:
and the same performer accompanied by some traditional flamenco dancers:
This person was clearly very popular. There were young kids in the audience singing along getting every word. I think the performer's name was Maria de la Colina.
This boat floats around the river in the morning and rinses off every wall, walk, bridge piling and embankment it can reach with its water cannon:
Really, the city does a great job of keeping clean. They have a massive workforce taking care of trash, streets, trees etc. The folks I've seen all seem to take pride in their work. Heck, here it's probably a living wage job (as it should be). Coupled with a national health care system, you see little crime and little homelessness.
Among the other things I noticed this morning as I walked around, this crocheted artwork hanging along the brick embankment on the Sevilla side of the river:
I liked the look of the old bricks in this wall so much that I decided to make them the background image of the blog:
A little further along the river, you meet La Torre del Oro (the tower of gold):
complete with a few palm trees.
I took the trash out this evening and checked on the moon (there's supposed to be a lunar eclipse, but perhaps not visible here, turns out it's tomorrow evening, thanks Kath). Regardless, it was a full moon and very pretty rising above La Torre del Oro:
I also noticed some folks feeding the ducks and geese below the bridge:
As promised, a day late, here is a video of last night's performers, a band called Alameda. They were pretty talented musically, leaned towards a kind of rock, but with interesting guitar and non-traditional timings. Here's the one song I recorded:
I realize sitting down to write this that I didn't post the promised videos from last night's visit to the square to see who was on the concert stage. The challenge is that I take all these photos and videos on my phone. When I get home, the phone uploads all the stuff to my google photos. I can't put anything into these pages until that upload finishes. The internet here in the flat isn't bad for downloading, but for uploading I suspect it's not much better than the old phone modems we used to have in the 90's. Especially when there's a video, I think the uploads aren't finishing until well into the night. I guess the move is to just post them a day late. So, here are a couple of videos from last night's performance. I should give credit to who these performers are, but I can't find any information about them anywhere:
Tomorrow, I'll post the video I took just now at this evening's performances.
This morning I went out for a run. I ran about 4 miles out along the river, found a bike share station and rode back home. It was a nice combination that I think I'll keep trying.
Laura received her absentee ballot from Walla Walla, filled it out and was ready to mail it (for some reason, mine has yet to arrive, even though, presumably they were both mailed at the same time). We went to the local post office to make sure it received the correct postage, but it was closed (summer hours):
We did notice that there was another post office listed on the sign as having longer hours. Also, it was in the direction of Laura's language school, so we walked over that way. It was open, there wasn't really any waiting and the postal clerk was quite efficient. Laura's vote is on its way back to Walla Walla and should get there well before the Aug 7th election date. We continued from the post office to the language school passing by the Catedral de Sevilla:
The main entrance really is impressive. We haven't been on the tour yet. We're saving it for a rainy day, literally. I'm looking forward to seeing the inside though. With Laura in class, I walked back home (obligatory photo from the bridge):
I spent the afternoon doing math, as per usual. A mathematician's life is mostly coming up with conjectures and convincing yourself (and others) that they're correct. Unfortunately, you have to get used to being wrong... a lot. About 99 out of 100 conjectures that a mathematician comes up with are wrong somehow. The other 1 out of 100, we prove and subsequently publish. I have a conjecture I've been working on for a couple of days now and today I proved it was wrong. I was disappointed. I really liked it. But, not surprised.
Later in the afternoon, while working on the next conjecture, I realized that my proof of the incorrectness of the earlier conjecture was... incorrect. I've been doing this for a while and the mixed emotions are weird. On the one hand, the conjecture that I liked lives to fight another day. On the other hand, I made a mistake convincing myself that it was false. Things like this happen all the time with math. I'm sure after a few hours tomorrow, I'll again convince myself that the conjecture is false and a few hours after that, I'll convince myself that my argument for why it's false is correct. But, it's fun and I'm looking forward to playing around with it again tomorrow.
As I alluded to earlier, this evening, after Laura got home from class, we went out to the square to see who was on stage tonight. I'll post video tomorrow, but the one photo we took, a selfie of us, at least, has been uploaded to google:
One more day of the festival left. We'll see who's playing on stage tomorrow evening.
Mario left some adhesive felt to put on the feet of the desk he brought us a couple of days ago. We decided to just put the desk on a small piece of area rug, so felt not needed there. However, our dining room chairs make a lot of noise when sliding around on the tile floors, so we decided to use the felt squares on them instead:
So far, so good.
We went to the supermarket this morning--a daily ritual. Along the way, we scoped out the local post office.
It's a bit off the beaten path, but not far from the apartment. It's also quite new and modern--a step up from most of the drab, bureaucratic post offices in the US. More like a FedEx or Kinkos than a post office.
Since we always walk and carry our groceries back to the flat, we have to be careful about what and how much we buy. One way to control that is to not use the regular sized grocery carts, but instead just use the smaller baskets. The small baskets here are really nice. They have wheels and you pull them around by long handles:
You get the small size you're looking for, but you don't have to carry it around the store while you shop.
After shopping and lunch, Laura went to Spanish class and I stayed home and did math. I had another relatively productive afternoon. This evening I took the trash down to the bins and snapped a couple of pictures in the waning light. This is just the face of the building above the Triana Marketplace. I think it's just flats:
This is a small chapel right at the foot of our bridge (on our side):
This is looking across the river at Sevilla proper:
When Laura got home, we went around the corner to see who was playing on the stage this evening at the Triana festival. I have some video, but the phone is taking forever to upload it, so I'll post it here tomorrow.
When we got back to our building, the area around our entryway was occupied by this "scary" gang of kids. Apparently they get to play around in the alley while their parents enjoy the beer & tapas bar across the way:
La Velá de Triana continues here in the neighborhood although not much happens in the daylight hours. There was another greased pole/capture the flag thing happening on the river this evening. Most stuff happens in the evening from around 8pm to around 1am.
Last night we went out to the square where there is a temporary stage in place. The crowd was pretty healthy:
The first performer was an older guy singing with a guitar accompaniment. Later on, a younger, flamenco style singer took over:
It's definitely a pro-Triana affair with all of the performers talking about how Triana is "the best" neighborhood in Sevilla etc. We did hit a gelato place before heading home. The two workers there were very busy, but also very friendly. One of them helped Laura come up with a great combo of dark chocolate and some kind of toffee gelato. Here's them working while we had our gelatos in the shop:
My normal shirt of choice is an unmarked t-shirt. T-shirts are pretty popular here. Nearly all of them have some kind of english phrase on the front. My t-shirts stand out by their boringness. That said, today I wore one of two shirts total that I have with me that have writing on them. In this case, my University of Miami Band t-shirt:
The other one is from the Sawtooth Grill in Hood River.
I put in a good amount of math work this afternoon. Laura had her Spanish class. I met her after class and we went to a photo shop to get me some passport pictures. I'm going to get an "international drivers permit" so that we can rent cars here in Spain (an IDP is required).
After dinner, I watched a little Rick & Morty on Netflix. At 10pm, we headed out to see who/what was on stage this evening. Looked like a live comedy radio show. I barely know Spanish, so watching a comedy gig in Spanish was not going to work for us. We continued to walk around a bit. We saw a local police car:
The beer & tapas tent street was packed again:
The tents stretch a good solid block along the river:
Our street is closed to cars:
But that didn't stop folks from patronizing the beer & tapas place across from our flat:
Looking forward to seeing what happens here tomorrow. Until then...
