El Jueves

As has become my habit lately, I joined Laura on her school's weekly "cultural activity". This week we walked over to el mercadillo el jueves. This is an outdoor bazaar every Thursday on calle Feria. The street is closed for the event. If you have ever been to a flea market in the US, then you have a very clear idea of what this market is:

Of course, when I finally kick the bucket and Laura and/or the girls need to clear all of my crap out of the garage/house, their yard sale will definitely have a section that looks like this–old bike parts:

I also spotted this very peculiar picture of Jesus. At one angle, his eyes are closed, at another angle they are open, very strange:


After looking at other people's crap for a while, we went to the oldest indoor market in Sevilla–el Mercado de Feria. It has been a functioning market since the Roman empire (around 2000 years now):

I was particularly struck by this stall which purported to offer that classic food combination of bananas and fried chicken! The only worker in the joint was looking at his phone. I'm sure we were just lucky to catch him during a lull. Probably not in the ancient Romans' wildest dreams did they imagine such a food stand. Though, I'm certainly less ancient and I still have a hard time imagining it.

Conjugation

My language class meets Mon and Wed from 4-5:30pm. I probably should have realized this earlier, but it really dawned on me today that I have to be a bit more deliberate with my Spanish studies in the time between classes. Up to this point, I have relied on duolingo and random conversations with Laura, but today when I had to write out the conjugations of several spanish verbs (and struggled), I realized I've got to vary my studies a bit more. I think I'm going to start working my way through the spanish textbook we have here in the flat.

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The Triana Market turned on its Christmas lights yesterday. I recorded a bit of it here and added some special effects:


I'm looking forward to this weekend when all the city-installed Christmas lights are turned on.

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The temperature was around 41 degrees this morning–probably our coldest temperature so far. That said, it made it up to 66 with calm sunny skies this afternoon. I'd be happy to go through the winter months like that.

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Still working on my freezing fog data analytics project. I keep getting sidetracked learning new features of the pandas data analysis tool. I'm really enjoying its time indexing features (which happen to be quite useful when working with time series data, like weather data). I haven't got to the point of actually doing the machine learning part. As with most data analysis projects, preparing the data for analysis is the hard part.

New Chair

Preparation for house guests continues. In terms of seating arrangements in the living room, we have two broad choices. The couch (which may be the most uncomfortable couch every) and the chairs around the dining room table (actually more comfortable than the couch). Realizing that those were crappy options for when we have visitors, we ordered a chair from Amazon.es. It came today and I put it together with no real issues. It's not bad. We'll see how it does over the next few days:

Also, it rocks-literally. It's a rocking chair.

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The painters are back in the building this week doing some detail work. They knocked on the door this afternoon and started speaking spanish. I had nothing, but luckily Laura was there. She understood them pretty well. They wanted to look at the shutters outside of our front windows. They were wondering if they needed to be painted from within the flat or whether they would be able to paint them from outside. They seemed to determine that they would not have to disturb the sanctity of our home to do the job. Everyone was pleased. I was also impressed at how Laura understood and talked to them. All that work is really paying off in her improved language skills.

Meteorolaundry

As you know, we don't have a clothes dryer here in Sevilla. After washing a load of clothes, we have two options: hang the clothes on the clothesline on the roof, or hang the clothes on a drying rack in the living room. The former is the preferred method. A pair of jeans using the latter method takes about 2 days to dry. Plus, you have the drying rack taking up valuable real estate in the apartment. As such, this is me on laundry day:

Studying the charts, reading the graphs, trying to figure out if it's going to stay clear and dry long enough to wash and subsequently dry the clothes outside. (Also, not really me, just a random photo from google images, but you get the point.)

Today based on my careful analysis using logarithms and parallel super computers, I decided to hang the laundry outside. When I got home from language class, Laura had already taken it down and folded it, dry as a bone. A success! (Last week it rained on our clothes, so it's definitely still a hit or miss process.)

Indeed, this was the view from the bridge as I came back home:

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In preparation for the parade of house guests we'll be having over the next 6 weeks or so, I moved my office out of the second bedroom and into a little breakfast nook in the kitchen:

It has its pros and cons. It's kinda noisy, especially when the washing machine or clothes washer is going. It has a window onto the courtyard, but you can smell cigarette smoke when the downstairs neighbor takes a smoke break. It has a little heater, but can get too hot when Laura's cooking (worth it). At least there's a bottle of wine for when things get really tough.

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This evening there was a bit of a commotion on the street. I looked out and there was a crew spraying down the road with a high-pressure hose. They do take care of the streets here in Sevilla:

Uber by Proxy

Emily and Renee left this morning to fly back to Morocco. They flew out of Sevilla to Lisbon, then on to Casablanca. I called an Uber for them using my account. I'd never had someone take an Uber that I called, but it seemed to be no problem. They got to the airport in plenty of time, Emily venmo'd me the fare and I gave the driver 5 stars after texting with Emily about how the driver was... modern technology.

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We did a pretty good job on leftovers today. I think we waste a lot less food here than in the US. I'm guessing it's because we have to work harder to get the food into the house (not having a car).

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I played around with a bit of P5JS. These past few weeks I've been working with smartphone sensors in my research and just for fun. As a proof of concept, I wrote a little web app that uses the rotation sensor in the phone to draw on the screen. You can play with it here. Tilt the phone to draw, tap the screen to change color, take a screenshot of your masterpiece. It's pretty basic, but I'm hoping to do something more interesting in the coming days.

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Just to do some people watching, we walked over to the cathedral area this afternoon. We've been over that way many times, but this was the first time I'd noticed a tiny sundial on the back side of the building:

It's the tiny black triangle on the barest part of the wall in the upper-right corner of the above photo. Trying to be artistic, I took this photo of the Archivo De Indias through and open archway:

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I talked to Rachel for awhile. She's back from a week in Santa Barbara and yesterday's Miami football game and heading back into the grind on Monday. It's weird to think that she'll be here in Spain in a little over two weeks.