Yet Another Procession

This evening a procession went right down our street. The close up view we had from our front windows was really interesting. We were really able to see the "paseo", the religious float up close. In fact, they paused right in front of our building for a shift change in which about 30 tired men emerged from underneath the float to be replaced 30 fresh bodies. In this video, you can see the new crew roughly hoist the float up and continue the march:



We had no advanced warning. I'm glad that Emily and Renee were still in the flat when it went by. It was a real glimpse at a uniquely Sevillan cultural event. The band was really good too. Very brassy, with an almost New Orleans like looseness:

***

This morning was perhaps the coldest temperature of the year. There was heavy fog on the river:

The installation of Christmas lights continues throughout the city.

The lights haven't been turned on yet. According to folks at Laura's language school and other sources, the city will begin using the lights next Friday.

***

The fridge is full of leftovers now. No cooking for Laura for a few days.

***

Emily and Renee fly back to Casablanca tomorrow morning from the Sevilla airport. They'll need to leave the flat around 6:30am to get to the airport in a timely fashion. It's been fun spending time with them. They'll both be back in their classrooms on Monday morning.

Moroccan Exchange

One of Rachel's roommates from the University of Miami, Emily, is on a two-year teaching contract in Casablanca, Morocco. During her Thanksgiving break, she and her roommate, Renee, have been traveling around Spain. They are wrapping up their visit here in Sevilla and staying with us until Sunday morning when they fly back to Morocco. They arrived by train from Madrid this morning. I went over to the train station and "picked them up". Since we don't actually have a car, this means I took the bus to the train station, met them as they got off the train, and rode the bus with them back home.

They decompressed in our flat for a few hours while I did some work. Does this happen to anyone else when they work their computer too hard?

It's pretty annoying and happens about once a day for no discernible reason I can uncover. It was a generally productive morning, mathematically speaking, in spite of this blue screen of death.

***

After a bit of a rest, we met Laura after her class and walked around the cathedral area. Having expressed that they were a bit tired of tapas, we took Emily and Renee to a Mexican place we know near the cathedral. It's not the best mexican food, but it's passable. After lunch, Renee expressed a bit of a craving for macaroni and cheese, so Laura went off to the grocery store to prep that for dinner and the rest of us walked to the Plaza de Espana:

It always looks good in clear weather under a bright blue sky.

After that, we walked along the river back to Triana and home. The oranges are nearly at peak now:

***

At home, Laura chatted up our guests and I worked a bit more. Emily showed me the latest in trendy figurines. Indeed she pointed them out to us at one of the markets near the cathedral. Apparently you can buy a figurine of almost any kind of person... pooping. Proof:

This is the one the Emily bought in Barcelona. I have the toilet in the background for ambiance. I may have to start a collection.

***

The baked mac & cheese was excellent. Laura also put together a nice green salad to offset the utterly decadent mac & cheese. She even used a bit of leftover turkey meat in the salad. That said, the leftover situation is a bit abundant at the moment. I'm going to have to get busy or some of it's going to go to waste.

They're out getting dessert–helado. I resisted. Decided to stay home and do my blog.

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

***

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:

***

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):

***

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.

***

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.