Cathedral Redux

A visit to the Cathedral is a pretty standard trip for us when entertaining visitors. I like going with so much familiarity. I'm not awed and distracted and it allows me to find details I missed before.

First, I gotta say, Christian iconography is not for the faint of heart. This  17th century sculpture of St. John the Baptist's severed head is pretty darn graphic (gotta love that esophagus):

I found a convenient pillar to do some long-exposure shots of Christopher Columbus' tomb:

The sky light in this old Moorish ablutions room was open to the sky for the first time in any of my visits. The brilliant sunshine really changed the character of the normally dark room:

On a whim, I camped in front of this entrance to one of the receiving chambers in the Cathedral and did a timelapse of visitors. I was struck how, if you pay attention, there a little vignettes of stories as each guest passes through the frame:

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Laura made a Greek inspired lunch of grilled chicken, hummus, veggies on pita with tiziki. Wonderful! Especially good because she managed to do it with only a Carrefour Express grocery store available (everything else is close because... Sunday). For dinner, we went to 100 Monteditos, pretty good. It's like the White Castle of small sandwiches. Bonus, on Sunday, all of the tiny sandwiches are 1 euro. The three of us managed to eat dinner for about 11 euros, haha.

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Today is election day in Spain. The big issue this time around is how the far-right VOX party fares. So far the voter turn out is high, which is always good I suppose.

Cádiz

We got up "muy temprano" to begin our day trip to Cádiz. We started by taking the tram to the train station:

Ninety minutes later, we exited the train station at Cádiz:
 

The first thing we noticed was a cruise ship that was the size of a city block in port:

We wandered into a plaza and had breakfast in a cafe in the sun:

Laura paid the bill entirely with euro coins she's been collecting:

In another park I found this guy expounding about the moon:

Just playing with snapseed filters on this photo of a statue in one of the parks:

The Atlantic Ocean was remarkably calm:

We went up into a tower that housed a "cámara oscura". This is the cathedral in Cádiz:

From here you could see the line of Calle Sacramento as it cuts across the old part of the city:

Obligatory tower selfie:

This theater with an odd name, Gran Teatro Falla (The Big Theater Failur):

Another calm view of the Atlantic:

The weather  was beautiful. I also saw this sailboat being "rescued" by a coast guard ship:


After a while, escaping the sun became a priority. This beautiful magnolia tree along the beach provided welcome shade:

Even the monk parakeets enjoyed the shade:


I was entertained by this girl's struggle to "walk" her dog which was substantially bigger than her:

In the search for a public restroom, I went into a fort on the beach and took this photo of a couple of boats through this "embrasure" or "loophole" (I looked up fortification terminology, haha):

We visited the Plaza de Espana of Cádiz. In Sevilla, the Plaza de Espana is a semi-circular, ornate building. Here in Cádiz, it is a semi-circular memorial sculpture/statue:

I guess the semi-circular-ness is the theme. We wandered to the finish line of a triathlon:

We re-traced our steps back to the train station, back to Sevilla, and back to our flat. We got home around 10:30pm walking back through streets crowded with the usual Saturday night gatherings in bar/cafes.

Plaza de Espana

As we do with most of our guests, we went over to the Plaza de Espana with Marge today. It is an impressive building and grounds. I don't really get tired of it. On this tree on the way in hung a sign that said "Te doy oxigeno y sombra, cuidame."

Translated, it says, "I give you oxygen and shade, care for me." The air was clear and dry--a good day for photographs:

After the Plaza, we walked through the nearby Parque de Maria Luisa. Here are a couple of the new ducks:

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I finished up implementing some new, better, more general notation in my paper. I also have an idea on how to simplify the currently very long proof near the end of the paper. Laura's comments have made the paper better. Today I feel good about its chances of getting accepted.

Marge visits.

Not Homer's wife. A friend of Laura's from the community college back in Walla Walla retired this year and is on a several-week trip to Europe. She's visiting Sevilla this week and staying with us. I took the bus out to the airport this morning to meet her and escort her back to our flat.

She took a bit of time to rest. Laura went to class and I went to the gym. We met Laura after class and went out for tapas. Along the way, we ran into another small procession:

We also were able to peek inside a church and see the dismantling of a couple of pasos:

We shared a few tapas on the Alameda:

and headed home.

On our main street, we saw a crew hauling another partially dismantled paso out to storage for another year:

Imperativo

We've been doing the imperative form in Spanish, so I spent some time today reading and practicing. My Spanish class doesn't use a textbook. We we cover a topic, I usually go home and scrape together my own resources on the Internet, or from a Spanish textbook pdf I found on-line. Of course, after all that preparation, we didn't do imperative today, but rather all the other ways to express obligation like: tener + que, hay+que, necesitar, es necesito, debes etc.

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It was cold and rainy today. I moved my office out of the guest room and back into the space off of the kitchen in preparation for a sequence of guests starting tomorrow and extending into the middle of May. I also did a load of laundry which is currently on the drying rack in the living room (rain) and vacuumed a bit.

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After class, I went to the gym. On the way home, I took this picture of a building I pass frequently on our street, but whose tile work is particularly photo worthy:

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One of the Italian students in my class recommended the Italian restaurant Al Solito Posto here in Sevilla on the Alameda. Maybe we'll try it with our house guests.