Backsliding

Woke up at around 9:45am this morning. Clearly backsliding on the jetlag. I didn't do much today. Did a load of laundry and dried it on the drying rack in the guest room. This load included the bed sheets. Everything is dry now and back in its place. I guess this will be sustainable for a while. It may be tough if/when we have visitors in that guest room where the drying rack is currently located.

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I've been having fun gathering raw GPS data from my phone and doing analysis on it. The past couple of days I've been obsessing over noise in the signal and attempting to quantify its effect. I've been reading about low pass filtering and discrete Fourier transforms. At the same time, I've been doing the analysis in python and becoming comfortable with the jupyter environment, the pandas and numpy libraries, and visualization with matplotlib. All of this should be useful when I return to teaching next year.

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I went out for a walk this evening, both for exercise and to collect more GPS data, haha. For the first time, I walked along the river the night before instead of the morning after. There were large groups of people partying even a 8pm as I walked through. The beverage of choice seems to be the 40oz beer (or the metric equivalent). Pretty much a one-to-one correspondence between bottles and people.

The streets were generally busy this evening. Along San Jacinto someone was selling these LED figures/toys:

They were kind of pretty all arrange in the waning light.

Geoduck

We went to Bar Santa Marta for dinner. I had a geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck") tapas. Very weird texture, not much taste, would definitely pass next time. Here's what they looked like before getting sliced up into the tapas:

They're basically clams with a borderline obscene shape when out of the shell.

We went with Wang Zhi, someone from Laura's language school:

After dinner, we kind of just wandered around. We saw this giant fish in a pescaderia:

We also saw this flamenco dancer:


And we saw this rock/jazz trio, Musgö, that featured a harp:


I was hoping to find some of their music on-line, but so far no luck. EDIT: Here's a youtube video, and the harpist's, Mar Gabarre's, youtube channel.

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There's a new store going in on the main street (San Jacinto) in our neighborhood.

The sign went up today "ALE-HOP". I got kind of excited and took this picture. We could always use a bar that does more than just the usual beers around here. Sadly, this is not an exotic beer house. ALE-HOP is a gift store. We definitely don't need another gift store.

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Found this fun, simplified map of Sevilla in the local mall. I like the style:

Quico is Short for Francisco

Along the river walk there are lots of walls that are commissioned for murals. This one caught my eye a few weeks ago and I finally remembered to take a picture:

The sun glare was totally accidental, but a nice touch.

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Laura's language school has a cultural activity once a week on Thursday's afternoons. Her instructor allows visitors to accompany students, so I went along today. The instructor, Lucia, took us to Espacio Santa Clara, an art museum. The main exhibit was a retrospective of the Spanish artist Francisco "Quico" Rivas. Interesting counter-cultural work. I took a few pictures of pieces I liked. This is a self-portrait, I think:

 These notes seem to have been rescued from a fire:

 I just kinda liked this:

 This one was my favorite. An avid prison reformer in the wake of Franco's death, each of these pieces was made by an incarcerated female. Each features an emery board:

 I appreciate the sentiment here with each passing day:

 This caravan of camels:

Lucia was very nice. She spoke Spanish slowly and clearly enough that I understood a lot of what she said. Also, she's learning English, so I didn't feel bad speaking English because it was an opportunity for her to practice. We were a small group. Laura, me and a recent high school graduate from Scotland named Scarlet. Scarlet is on a gap year before starting university.

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Halloween is a thing here. This store, and many others, have Halloween displays up:

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I realized today that if we have to dry our clothes on a drying rack, we're going to have to do laundry more frequently. I did a load today and tried out our new drying rack. This is the new paradigm, at least for a few weeks:

Laura and I went out and got a fan and put it in the room with the drying rack in hopes that it would accelerate the drying process. We also put the air conditioner on in that room. Hoping that they dry over night. If so, then we shouldn't have any real problems while the roof is inaccessible.

Malls for Miles

Last week while I was away, Laura reported in her blog that a new mall had opened up near our flat on our side of the river. Today we went over to have another look around (me for a first look). I still can't get over that all of this construction was going on in a place that I walked by dozens of times and there wasn't really a hint. Here's a map of the mall:

There are three floors of underground parking. There's a garden on the roof. It has a lovely indoor/outdoor design. Plus, we found a reusable ice pack in the farmacia there. We'd been kind of looking around for one for several weeks. There are a few chain restaurants in there that might be nice. There's also a "Target-like" department store called Primark that seems to be all the rage. It did seem reasonably priced and might be a good place to look for clothing as we get into the cooler months and start discovering gaps in the clothes that we brought over from the US in July.

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I slept until 9:15am this morning. Hoping to get up a little earlier tomorrow as I get back onto Sevilla time.

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Talked to Emily a bit this evening. She went to see about vaccinations for her Ethiopia trip and ended up with just a flu shot and some typhoid pills and some advice about how to reduce the risk of contracting other diseases while there. Mostly it's about preventing mosquito bites.

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I guess it's our turn for painting now. Mario informs us that our building will be undergoing some painting for the next 4-6 weeks. Mostly on the roof and the interior courtyard and patio. Unfortunately, we will lose access to the clotheslines on the roof. He kindly supplied us with a drying rack for here inside the flat. We managed with just a drying rack in Hungary with 4 people for a year, so I'm guessing we'll make this work too.

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I'm writing a little applied math article on using smartphone sensor data in the math classroom. I've been reading about numerical differentiation and GPS error. Interesting stuff. I tried to record 10 minutes of GPS data in the park today while reading, but must've screwed something up because the data file was empty when I got home. I'll try again tomorrow.

Back in Sevilla

Nice to be back home. The flights all ran on time and bus from the airport to the flat was also timely and easy. The flight to Madrid was a bit of a slog, but I managed to sleep about half of it away. I was glad I had a 2 hr layover in Madrid before my flight to Sevilla. Passport control in Madrid took about 45 mins, then you have to leave and reenter security because the Sevilla flight is in the domestic terminal.


The bus dropped me relatively close to the flat--on the other side of the bridge. I rolled my bag across the bridge:

My eating and sleeping is all wonky, but I really appreciated this sign that Laura left on the fridge:

Laura just got home from class so all is back to normal here in Sevilla. Hoping I can stay up until 11pm and sleep until 7am.