San Juan de Aznalfarache

This afternoon I walked to San Juan de Aznalfarache. It's a small city across the river to the west of us here. It's not that far in the grand scheme of things--only about 2.5 miles. It was a nice clear day for a walk with temperatures at about 70 degrees. The bridge across the Guadalquivir is mostly a pedestrian/bicycle bridge, though there is also a one-way lane for public transportation. The "sidewalk", which appeared to be bolted onto the bridge as an afterthought, was less than reassuring:

The river was low and muddy, but flowing to the south towards the Atlantic ocean about 50km downstream:

The bridge appears to be a drawbridge, now defunct. This massive cement block suspended above the bridge deck is a counterweight for the part of the bridge that raises up:

Here is the cantilever part beneath the counterweight:

Beneath the bridge on the other side of the river was a community garden. The gardens looked well-tended and productive--even in February:

There's a monument in the center of the city (which I neglected to photograph) called Monumento Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. It's up on a hill and has a set of switchbacking stairs leading up to it. I climbed the stairs and took a picture of Sevilla. The only real standout building in the Sevillian skyline is the "lipstick tower". Oh well:

Back on our side of the river, the retired streetcar a few blocks down from our flat looked good in the bright afternoon sunshine:

This evening, Laura and I had a quick dinner at one of the thousands of carry out Mediterranean food places around here. Love me some falafel. 

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I finished reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. I really liked his closing remark, so I'll put it here:  

Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.

 

You've got mail.

We don't get much mail here, but in the past two days we've received 3 cards! Yesterday, we got a thank you note from my sister's family for Christmas. Today, I got two birthday cards, one from Betty and one from Jim. Jim's even had a lottery scratch-off in it (we didn't win, not sure what we'd have done with it if we did win):

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Spanish class was interesting today. We had two new students. Judith, from Maine and Katie from Pittsburgh. At the end of class, Judith seemed to think it was too advanced for her, but Katie seemed ok with it.

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When I got home from class, Carlos, our neighbor with two children, was fixing the lamp shade in the courtyard that one of his sons broke a couple of weeks ago with a ball. As I was passing by, he called out and asked if I wanted any oranges. I said sure! Turns out they recently purchased a small vacation home about 20km east Sevilla and there are some orange trees on the property. It's the time of year to collect oranges around here and Carlos has an abundance. He gave me a bag of oranges. I figured they might be good, but probably hard to peel and lots of seeds.

Boy was I wrong. These were pro-level oranges. Sweet, seedless and easy to peel. He could sell them in Walla Walla by the bushel. Of course, there's just the little problem of transportation and marketing. I'm glad he gave some to me.

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Also on the way home, on the bridge (the best bridge), there was a guy playing an acoustic guitar with a background recording of Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits. I love that song. I stopped and listened. He was quite a good player. Here's a bit of it:

Happy New Year!

Today starts the Chinese year of the pig. I wished a couple of my students back in Walla Walla that are from China a happy new year. One came back with that fact that the pig is the end of the cycle of animals in the Chinese new year rotation. Pig is last because it lost the race among the animals in the cycle. Next year is the year of the mouse, so I guess the mouse won the race. Anyway, thanks for the Chinese culture lesson Linqi.

I cooked Emily's Christmas present today for lunch. She brought me a box of jambalaya mix from the US when she came to visit in December. I found some sausage at the store today, chopped it up and use the mix to make jambalaya. It was pretty good, but wow the sausage here is greasy. Eight hours later and I'm still kinda tasting it.

Rachel sent me a good book today called A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution. It's got good advice for anyone embarking on a data science project.

Speaking of Rachel books, the Factfulness chapter this evening admonished us to be careful when assigning blame--especially to individuals. Catastrophic failures are never attributable to a single individual. Similarly, wild successes are never attributable to single individuals. Dig a little deeper and look for the systems and policies that enabled the failure or success. They're almost always more mundane and subtle than we expect.

Baby Beluga

The song Baby Beluga has been stuck in my head this afternoon. Laura and I saw a beluga-shaped aircraft flying over the city today as we walked to our respective Spanish classes. Here's a horrible photo of it:

Turns out this is an Airbus A300-600ST Beluga. Its odd shape is to accommodate the transport of large aircraft parts as part of Airbus's internal operations. Like every other major city in Europe, Sevilla has an Airbus manufacturing site. It was interesting to see. So ungainly and hard to believe it flies.

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Speaking of Spanish class, my teacher from last semester replaced Piedad as our regular teacher. It was nice to have her back. She has a better idea of what our abilities are and what we hope to get out of the class.

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After Spanish, I went for a walk along the river. The light in the evening this time of year is pretty:

On the way home, I stopped by an Amazon drop point to pick up the peculiar batteries I ordered for my Dell stylus last week. Turns out, that's all that was needed--a fresh set of batteries. It's back to working again.

San Luis de los Franceses

This afternoon Laura and I went to visit the Parroquia of San Luis de los Franceses. This is one of the younger churches in Sevilla coming in at around 300 years of age. It was built as aJesuit monastary but only operated as such for about 30 years until the Suppresion of Jesuits caused it to be repurposed to other church functions. It's a beautiful, baroque church with ornate altars and high painted ceilings. It sits in a relatively ordinary neighborhood with streets so narrow, that it's difficult to capture the entire edifice in one photo without a wide-angle lens:

Inside there were altars and relics. Skulls abounded:

The ceilings were beautiful. Mirrors were provided to save patrons' necks:

An interesting feature of the former monastary is this side chapel that was constructed so that there would be a place to say mass while the big church was being constructed:

In this side chapel there were numerous relics on display. Here for example, are the ribs and collar bones of some saint or other:

This is the door that a priest would use to enter the altar area. I like the floating baby head above the door. Floating baby heads are a big deal in Catholic iconography, at least here in Sevilla:

This courtyard was filled with lush vegetation and skulls-er, I mean old clay pots. I thought they were skulls, cuz why not? there's skulls everywhere else, but no, they're just old clay pots:

This is the crypt beneath the church. Personally, I was disappointed at the complete lack of dead bodies, or at least skulls!

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In other news, one of my Whitman students asked me for advice on where to hike around Walla Walla, so I put together this simple google map to help her out. I also warned her repeatedly that if she encountered snow or mud on the road to one of these, that she should just turn around. It's really easy to get stuck up there (been there, done that).

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The super bowl starts around 12:30am here. I'm thinking I might miss it this year.