Costco Run

Laura and I decided to test the bus system here and head out to the Costco on the edge of town. It's about 6km from the flat and a bit out of range of the bike share system, so it's the bus. We haven't used the bus system here yet, but today was the day to figure it out.

Mario left us a rechargeable bus card. Laura put some funds on it a couple of days ago using the public transit web site. To use it, just tap the card on a sensor when you get on the bus and your account is automatically debited. Furthermore, you can tap multiple times if traveling with multiple people. For us, two people, two taps.

To avoid a transfer, we walked/rode bikes a bit to get to the bus stop. Once there, we hopped on and in about 15-20 mins we were near the Costco. A bit of a walk at that end and we were at our destination:

Costco here is very similar to those in the US. Also, our US membership works here. We walked around just to see what kinds of things we could find here that are hard to find in the stores near our flat. We knew we couldn't go for a lot of stuff or really bulky stuff since we had to carry it all back home. After a thorough walk through we came away with some spaghetti sauce, salsa, almonds, peanut butter, dishwasher detergent and a small flat of raspberries.

By the time we got through, it was getting late and I was hungry. I didn't want to wait until we got back home to get something. Plus, there was a McDonald's adjacent to the Costco (and not much else). After a bit of waffling, we went to the McD's figuring we could find a salad if nothing else. Indeed, salads were available. I grabbed a chicken Caesar salad. Interestingly, the dressing was a small packet of olive oil and a small packet of vinegar:

They even have little McDonald's M's on them. The salad with dressing was good. We headed back to the bus stop:

Sadly, we waited on this little corner because we thought we saw the bus stop here as we approached. We missed that bus though and waited for the next one. The next one did pull through after about 15 mins, but the driver wouldn't let us on because this wasn't actually a bus stop. It was just a place the bus stopped briefly as it negotiated a sharp left turn on its route. The driver motioned us to walk down the street behind him, so we did. We found a clearly marked bus stop about 100M down the street, ugh. After another 15 mins, yet another bus appeared, stopped, and picked us up. Yay!

The return route has a stop that's closer to our flat so we were able to walk home pretty quickly with our load of groceries. Laura's class time was immanent, so we unpacked the groceries and she hurried off to class.

I worked on some math. I also did a little housework. The flat here and lovely marble/granite tile floors. I noticed a few of the high traffic areas were getting a bit dirty, so I vacuumed and mopped the whole place. We've been here about a month. I'm thinking I should do that at least once a month based on how dirty the mop bucket water was, haha.

Didn't get enough sleep last night because of the concert, so I'm hitting the sack early tonight. Plus, gotta run tomorrow morning, so... good night!

Mozart Heroes

Progress on the painting of the building directly across from ours continues:

It goes kind of fast when there are 3 people working simultaneously. It's looking good. They knock off around 2:30pm to avoid the hottest part of the day.

Laura has Spanish class every day from 4-7:30pm. I usually walk her to class over on the Sevilla side. It's interesting to walk the same route every day and look for new details. This time I noticed that many of the balconies on upper floors of buildings have palm front adornments. On the way home, I took pictures of a a variety of them and created this montage:

It seems natural that this is a common adornment. After all, there are a lot of palm trees here and you gotta do something with the dropped fronds. Also, being a predominantly Roman Catholic country, maybe these are palms from Palm Sunday. I know from my own Catholic upbringing that some folks save the palms from Palm Sunday service and hang them somewhere until the following Easter season. Some places even burn the dried palms from the previous year to create ashes for Ash Wednesday services.

I did some math on the research side today and developed an interesting idea. I did not do any machine learning. My job here is to do my own research and to develop an introductory machine learning course for the Whitman curriculum. Some days I do a little of both, some days I just do one or the other.

Laura is really good about finding things for us to do here in Sevilla. Last night she got us tickets to a two-man musical act from Switzerland called Mozart Heroes. One was billed as a rock guitarist, the other was a classical cellist. They mixed and merged their respective disciplines into a fun and enjoyable set. They have some lovely classical arrangements of Mozart, Vivaldi, and Bach for guitar and cello. Most of the classical pieces at some point would break or transition to pop and rock pieces including Metallica, AC/DC, Guns & Roses to name a few.

The crowd was into it and the performers clearly prepped for their tour through Spain. They played a Spanish pop tune that pretty much everyone in the audience sang along to (these guys didn't singe at all, just instrumentalists). It definitely killed though if I were advising them, I'd have them end the concert with that piece in future Spain shows.

The venue was the terrace of that Auditorio Rocío Jurado. This auditorium is up in the somewhat abandoned Expo '92 area. You can kind of see that that a lot of the grounds are not really maintained. The white building on the left is the auditorium proper. The grassy area is the channel of a canal that flowed through this area during the Expo but is now dry and overgrown:

A look in the other direction shows other unused buildings, some futuristic old exhibit buildings along with a mock-up of a European Space Agency rocket. I think an Ariane class:

You can also see the continuation of the overgrown canal between the building and the rocket.
The "terrace" is a small stage outside of this building with facilities and a bar:

It was well-attended:

Here's a bit of a sample of what we saw/heard. It starts classical and transitions to the Ghostbusters theme:

The obligatory band selfie (from their fb page):

We're in there somewhere, haha.

More on Cervantes

I dismissed Cervantes' connection to Sevilla a bit too quickly yesterday. Laura pointed me to this article, Cervantes in Seville: The Prince Of Spanish Wit In Andalusia. The TLDR, he moved to Sevilla in the late 16th century and was a tax collector. He cheated, went to prison. His time in prison is said to have motivated his writing of Don Quixote. The bronze of him I showed yesterday is on Calle Entre Carceles ("between the jails"). Street names are on the buildings here (and in a lot of Europe). If you look closely at the corner of this building across from the bronze, you can see the aforementioned street name:

Went out for a walk this morning and hit some areas with more modern buildings:

The building in the center is beautiful and seems to house lots of social service agencies. The tall one on the right is still a mystery to me. It's closed.

This bridge is a couple bridges north of our bridge (the best bridge). It doesn't really go anywhere and is very lightly used, which is why I'm able to stand in the middle of the road and take a picture at 8:30am (rush hour):

It seems to be yet another relic of the expo in '92. Here's my running path along the river as it looks from this bridge:

Looks like they're painting the building across the street from us. They start early and end around 1:30pm, I guess to avoid the peak daytime heat:

At the market today, we saw this little dog waiting for its master in the foyer/entrance. Pretty friendly:

Got a decent amount of math done today.  Time for bed now.

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.

Isla Mágica

There's an amusement park about 2km north of our flat along the river called Isla Mágica. We couldn't live here for a year and not go right? Also, there's a serious dearth of public swimming pools here in Sevilla. Given the typically long, hot summers, this doesn't make sense to us. With the hot weather, we've really been longing to go to a pool--any pool. There are several water rides at the park, but there's also an attached water park with a pool, water slides, lazy river and a wave pool. With the weather hot and sunny, we decided to spend the day at the park and attached water park.

We rode over there on a couple of the bike share bikes. I didn't get too many pictures, but we had a good time. We did a circuit of the amusement park and rode what seemed interesting. They only have one major rollercoaster, Jaguar. It was pretty good, but it beat you up a bit. There were also the usual amusement park shows. They were all in Spanish, so not as engaging for us on the entertainment side, but engaging in the "what-the-heck-are-they-saying?" side.

Aside from the ubiquitous Spanish, the scenes were indistinguishable from what you would see in a US park. For Walla Walla people, the park is on the same scale as Silverwood up there in northern Idaho.

It was a long day and I'm pretty worn out. I'm supposed to run tomorrow morning... we'll see.

Here are a few random pictures. The whole park is kind of lagoon-y and pirate-y:

The water park:

 Our rented spot at the water park (11 euros for the two chairs and a locker, meh):

 Waiting for dinner:

 Misters misting (these are everywhere in Sevilla, not just amusement parks):

 Pirate/acrobatic show:

 Dancing, fancy horses:

No sunburn, copious use of sunscreen, umbrellas and strategic indoor shows.

Hasta mañana.