Thanksgiving

This year I'm thankful that circumstances allow me to live for a year in Spain. There aren't many folks that have the opportunity to pull themselves out of their lives for a year to explore something completely different

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This week, Laura's Spanish teacher led us on a tour of the Archivo de Indias. This is a central storage archive for all of the documents related to Spain's commerce with the new world. There are documents in the archive that are nearing 600 years of age. This was my second visit to the archive. I mostly tagged along because the tour was given entirely in Spanish and it's a good listening exercise for me. I took a few pictures though. The tile floor in the archive is a beautiful brown and white checker:

Visitors can rest on velvety benches. They resemble pews quite a lot:

The weather was rainy and miserable as seen through this window looking down on a square below:

The archive is adjacent to the cathedral. The cathedral and palm tree were well-framed by this window:

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Thanksgiving is not a thing in Spain. However, Laura was determined to create a traditional Thanksgiving meal with the available resources. While you can't buy a whole turkey here in Sevilla (at least not easily), Laura made stuffing and baked it under some turkey breast. She also worked hard on some gravy (noting that she would kill for a whisk):

I would rate her efforts a major success. The stuffing and turkey were wonderful. The gravy was excellent. This is what the full spread looked like. I was in such a hurry to eat it, that I didn't even wait for my camera to focus (which is why this shot is horrible):

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This was the first time having Thanksgiving without Emily and Rachel. While we missed them, it was nice to know that they were spending the holiday with each other. Rachel flew to Santa Barbara to spend the holiday with Emily there.

I managed to talk to Betty and Jo-Anne on the phone. For those I didn't talk to directly, I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving. According to google, that translates to: Feliz acción de gracias!

The Germans

Laura and I went to dinner with a couple of German students from my language class. We went to an Italian place and spoke English–a very international affair. The restaurant, La Locanda di Andrea, was good. In honor of Thanksgiving, we ordered a pumpkin ravioli tapa. It was not my favorite, but edible. We had several other tapas of Italian origin–arancini balls, gnocchi, fried bread.

Martin is from Berlin and is a geneticist doing a postdoc in a lab affiliated with the university. Claudia is a tax analyst from Stuttgart who managed to wrangle a 50% sabbatical from her job in Germany to work remotely here in Sevilla and be nearer her Spanish boyfriend. That arrangement ends next week when she has to return to Germany and resume her full-time workload. She hopes that the past three months have been a proof-of-concept for her employer and that they may allow her to live in Sevilla and work remotely at 100%.

Laura took a picture of us. Since I granted her exclusive use of the phone on the walk home, I'll link to her page if you want to see it.

Also in the restaurant was a world map with pins indicating where diners were from:

You can see that Europe is well-accounted for. I'm pretty sure my pin was the first one for Walla Walla, though there was a nearby pin that I think was for Spokane.

Mercadona

It's pretty much a daily task here to go to the grocery store every day. It can be a chore sometimes, but you get into a rhythm after a while. Today I decided, since I have walked and will continue to walk to and from this store every day, to do a timelapse video of the excursion:


It's bit jittery around the edges. I used the "stabilize" feature of google photos to reduce the amount of up and down oscillation that resulted from my walking motion.

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I continued to develop some examples for a math problem I'm working on. It's been slow because I'm using a computer to do a large calculation and I have to run a lot of examples in order to trust the results of the larger computation.

I also started analyzing some weather data as part of a machine learning exercise. A chemistry prof back at Whitman, Nate Boland, wondered whether a machine learning classifier might be used on local weather observations in Walla Walla to predict the occurrence of freezing fog far enough in advance to be useful. I grabbed 10 years of weather data from the Walla Walla Airport weather station and am going to see if I can answer that question for Nate. It's also just a good exercise for me to improve may data analysis skills.

Freezing fog is not one of the things I miss about Walla Walla.

In the Heat of the Night

My dad used to love that old police drama. Mostly because he loved Carroll O'Connor, of Archie Bunker fame, who played the police chief in that show. For whatever reason, this shot of a police car cruising down San Jacinto through the all-pervasive smoke from a chestnut roaster, reminded me of that show:


I took a few long-exposure shots of the neighborhood from our roof this evening:

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I had my regular Spanish class today. I did a little bit of the DataCamp class Interactive Data Visualization with Bokeh. I worked a bit on a math problem, but only had small progress. Laura went to Costco today for the first time in a while. Turns out they have whole turkeys there. She didn't buy one, but has plans to sometime soon (though not for Thanksgiving). They also had cranberries. She bought some and made one of our household's regular meals–cranberry chicken. It was just as good as I remember it from back in WW. We haven't had it since WW for lack of cranberries.

Lincoln

 As I mentioned earlier, there are a few deciduous trees around Sevilla. I was struck by the fall colors along the river path today:

I wonder when they will re-grow their leaves. Sooner than the trees in Walla Walla? We'll see.

The boardwalk along part of the path has now been replaced with asphalt. Definitely a step up:

It remains to paint it green like all the other bike lanes in the city, haha.

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It rained a lot today. My walk was during a 2 hour break. There were some pretty vigorous downpours at times:

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Finally got around to watching the movie Lincoln today. It covers the last few months of the civil war and really focuses on the politics surrounding the passage of the 13th Amendment-the abolition of slavery. It was an interesting view of the politics of the age-certainly seedy and unseemly, but nowhere near the cesspool we see today. Lincoln and the other politicians pushing for the abolition of slavery act almost entirely out of principle with the legacy of the US at the forefront. A far cry from the zero sum game we see today. I thought to myself, it's hard to even imaging someone like Trump being in Lincoln's position during the Civil War. There's no doubt that he would have put the economic interests of the South above the abolition of slavery. Frankly, it's not just Trump, as a nation we've trained ourselves to view every issue through the lens of economics and growth. We've forgotten that if we act on principle, prosperity will follow. We've put the cart before the horse.