Category: updates

Birthday Trip in Sevilla

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So, I went back to Andalucía end of last month to see the city of Sevilla. Last time I was in that region, I stayed only in the mountains in Alajar for my Botanical Skincare and Art Retreat. Well, this time, I went to see the famous city for some sight-seeing and some artistic workshops – Mosaic Tile Making and the Flamenco Dance tutorial in the video below. 😀

This was the first time I went on a birthday trip without really much planning. I just wanted to take it easy this time. And also, no going to too many fancy restaurants that explain too much about the food and all that. Just simple, fresh and good quality food with some nice ambience. 🙂

We stayed at an AirBNB in a quiet location right next to the Market along Calle Feria. We had a lovely two-storey apartment at the top floor, with a big terasse overlooking the neighborhood and the gorgeous bell tower of the Parroquia Omnium Sanctorum, a nice small church right next to our place. Having a good view, is always a requirement for me when picking a place to stay. This is probably one of the nicest views I have ever had in an AirBNB (except for those overlooking the sea). I enjoyed taking my breakfast, snacks and apéro in this private terasse, just outside our bedroom. It was the first thing I see upon waking in the morning. And so, it was almost impossible for me to not paint this view. And I had to use my new Fabriano watercolor pencils, I chanced upon at the Fabriano shop at the airport in Munich from our last summer trip. These pencils are fantastic! I love them!

We wanted to go to Real Alcazar on our first day but the tickets were already sold out when we got there. We tried again the next day, earlier this time, but still sold out! We decided to just go to Plaza de España instead. I am not about to start queuing at 6AM and wait for three hours to enter! I was not really sure if Real Alcazar was worth it anyway since the garden was closed due to the flooding the day before we arrived. Also, it must be very crowded inside. And I don’t do well with overcrowded places. Meanwhile, Plaza de España did not disappoint. I also later found out that this was used as a filming location in “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.” It was so grand and so gorgeous in every corner! I was surprised to find out it was only built in the previous century!

The next day, my daughter and I tried our hand at Mosaic tile making at Triana Market. It was a bit tedious but quite a nice bonding experience. I found out that this market used to be a prison, and it was also right next to the dreaded Spanish Inquisition. I remember that from history classes. Not a very good core memory. We also checked out the tile shops right next to the market, where they sell just too many tiles. I got myself a nice small and cute souvenir in the form of hand-painted ceramic earrings.

We did a lot strolling around the area of our AirBNB, the market there was very nice, along with the shops and the restaurants. Also, the crowds were more local. The food, more authentic and cheaper. But still so very near to a lot of places of interest. One of the more quiet places that I liked so much was Palacio de las Dueñas, just a 10-minute walk from where we were staying. Lovely architecture, lovely garden, and lots of quiet corners.

I had the loveliest time in Seville, I highly recommend passing by it if you get a chance to visit Spain. Oh, and those orange trees everywhere !!! I just love them!

Watercolor Art Retreat, Lanzarote, Canary Islands

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As a loving treat to my wonderful self this year, I booked this relaxing Yoga and Watercolor Art Retreat in Lanzarote, Canary Islands in Spain. It was organized by Lucia of The Sun Collective. We had four days of very informative art classes by watercolor artist and Sennelier Ambassador, Catalina Rodriguez Villazon. I did not care so much about the yoga, though. It was too early for me to join, and I was always sleeping so late, or in the wee hours of the morning, for some reason. Probably because I was not used to the complete quiet, except for the howl of sea breeze at night.

The place was gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous! And I had the most beautiful room of all, with the beautiful view of the sea, and the surrounding volcanoes. It was a few steps to the dining / recreation area, with the huge orchard down below.

The food was wonderful, the service was exceptional, the place was magical! I had the most wonderful time with wonderful people, and it was one of the best experiences I will cherish most. 💖✨

Eat Paint Travel – Lago di Como and Piemonte, Italia

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I can’t believe I have totally forgotten to post about my Italian road trip with the family in the summer of 2023.

We started off in the French Riviera — Nice and stayed overnight in Menton. The next day, we headed off to Genova, and stayed at a tiny fishing village called Boccadasse, because we were avoiding the crowds in Cinque Terre. After a couple of days there, we headed towards Lake Como (Lago di Como) and visiting the famous villages around it — Bellano, Bellagio, etc. And finally we ended up in the beauteous and picturesque wine region of Piemonte (Piedmont), famous for its Nebbiolo vineyards for making Barolo wine.

It was a lot of driving, eating good Mediterranean food, vineyard visits, wine tasting, and my very first time to swim in a lake, coz I usually find them creepy. I still do, but Lake Como was gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous in every corner. We also visited Villa del Balbianelo, the famous site of Star Wars Episode 2 wedding scene of Padme and Anakin Skywalker. Oh, and did I mention, I did a lot of watercolor painting too?! 🙂

So here is a quick youtube video to show you how gloriously beautiful Italy is, which is why we keep coming back there with my family.

Thanks for dropping by, and have a good weekend!

Botanical Watercolor Art Retreat in Teyssode, France

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So, I just got back from a wondrous, week-long watercolor art retreat with Harriet de Winton here in the South of France.

I spent a full week interacting with a small group of lovely people from different parts of the world — mostly from North America, and the UK. And I got to meet and chat and learn first-hand, up-close and personal some watercolor tricks from Harriet herself, who stayed with us in the same location.

First of all, the venue, Domaine d’En Naudet was lovely. The hosts, Nicolas and Sophie, are a lovely couple who own the estate. My spacious room was kept clean every day (very unusual in these parts, except in hotels), has huge windows and is conveniently located directly in front of the hall where we hold our daily (almost) watercolor sessions with Harriet.

Each meal (lunch and dinner) was specially prepared by a British chef (forgot to get his name) but he said he works only with uptrek (the event organizer), and that he has a food truck somewhere in Teyssode or Albi. I should look him up. He was really good. As for the wine, and the wine trip and dégustation, I was not so crazy about it, and really quite disappointed. Although, I appreciate that they are trying to promote local wines.

All in all, I had the most enriching experience and wonderful time painting and relaxing and walking around the neighboring village of Albi, which I had not seen in ten years! It was worth revisiting.

Thanks for dropping by and have a lovely weekend!

Summa cum laude

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Omigosh! This is definitely the stuff of dreams. And this is such fresh news. I am feeling giddy with happiness. I just got my digital diploma and transcripts from the school, and imagine my shock when I read at the bottom of the diploma the following line:

Distinction / Mention : “ First Class / Summa cum laude (with honours) “

These are the sweetest words I had been waiting for since I started my master’s degree in autumn of 2021. All my hard work, blood, sweat and tears summarized in that lovely font, in one line of ascii characters, which could have practically spelled, “happiness” or “you did it”. 😀

Once upon a time, I decided on taking a random university degree that was not offered in our province so that I would have an excuse to study in the capital city. And what a fruitful future blossomed out of this total randomness. BS Computer Science was definitely not my first choice at sixteen. I wanted to enroll in Fine Arts. But that was not my calling. And who knew I would be able to practice art and fulfill my destined calling in tech at the same time! Everything in life falls right into place at some point.

After taking this course, I have a renewed appreciation of my experience and skills in the field of Information Technology. I have also developed a lot of interest in different fields of technology, like Artificial Intelligence, Data Engineering, Cloud Tech, etc. It made me realize how far I’ve come. And although, along the way, some people discouraged me, and a lot of people didn’t believe in me (including myself, at times), all it took was a handful of quality people to give me their complete faith for me to be able to have faith in myself.

Faith can really do move mountains.

I should end on this note coz I’m starting to ramble, and sound cheesy and all…

Lastly, I just want to say that my (real) friends and family (especially the hubs and the daughter, my number one fans) are so proud and happy for me. So am I. So please, indulge me with this extraordinarily in-your-face brag post. 😀

Lovelots,

Rio

Eat, paint, travel in San Sebastian, Spain

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In this youtube video, I take you to one of my favorite cities in the Basque Region — Donostia, San Sebastian, Spain. I was there a couple of weekends ago, to break the monotony of cold, gray, wintry weather in Toulouse. And also, to get some nice dose of Vitamin “Sea”. We were blessed with a superb sunny weather, and a lovely AirBnB apartment with a huge balcony overlooking the city center, which inspired me to paint plein air.

And so, I share with you a very quick and loose watercolor urban sketch of the view of San Sebastian’s rooftops in its city center, where you can also see the gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary, looking over the beautiful city. I also had some opportunity to visit a small art supplies shop called, La Casa del Artista.

I used my usual Silver Brush Black Velvet brush, and Da Vinci Casaneo brushes. And for pigments, I used Holbein Watercolors, and my trusty Portable Painter Micro to hold the pigments. For the sketch pad, I used my mini sketch pad from Moleskine.

Thanks for watching! 🙂

My online shop on Zazzle for shopping my original Filipino themed artworks

Nice restos in San Sebastian:

Muka

Xiri

Happy Holidays 2022

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Hey there! I know I’ve been slacking on posts lately. My new job has taken over most of my time lately. But since, it’s the holiday season, things are getting a bit more slow-paced at work starting this weekend. So I’ve taken the opportunity to post a watercolor painting demo, finally!

In this video, I was inspired by the Christmas lanterns that I found in Ikea here in France. They remind me so much of the Christmas lanterns that we have back in the Philippines (Parol), I just had to make a watercolor version of them in a Christmas greeting card.

Since I’m always missing the tropics, especially, the beach, I’ve created this tropical themed greeting card. If you guys are interested, I sell some greeting cards, and other gift items with my original watercolor prints on them on zazzle.com. Mostly, Filipino themed. This year, I am so happy to have sold quite a lot! I’m finally going to be able to cash out my earnings! 🙂 What a treat. Thanks to those who patronized my humble artworks.

Hope you have a great holiday. Cheers!

My Birthday in Paris and Yoyo Ma Concert, etc.

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Last month, I celebrated my birthday in Paris with the hubs and some friends. We stayed at one of our friends’s very lovely apartment, which overlooks the Eiffel Tower. It was wonderful!!! I didn’t wanna leave the room with the view. 😀

We also saw Yoyo Ma at the Philharmonie de Paris. We booked the ticket early this year, and it was almost fully booked! We were still lucky to get seats third row from the stage, facing the front. Here is a video of some of snaps and video shorts I took during the mini-breaks in the concert.

The Philharmonie de Paris was majestic outside, but a bit disappointing inside. But I still had fun watching the concert. It was a birthday gift from my wonderful husband. We had a great time despite the noisy people in the audience violently coughing and sneezing all the time. It was so nerve-wrackingly distracting. I do not know how Yo-Yo Ma managed to keep his calm and cool throughout all the noise. And having said that, I think it will be the last time I will be watching him live. It was too distracting. But it was a real pleasure seeing him live in the flesh. Best birthday gift ever!

Lastly, a bit of update on the job hunt: before going on this trip, exactly a day before, actually, I received a very good news from one of the companies I have applied to. I started working two weeks after this trip. I was ecstatic!!! I have been on the job for two weeks now, and so far, I’m still not disappointed. It’s a great company, one of the biggest French IT Consulting companies, and my client is the biggest aviation company in Europe. Also, I’m working on their big data platform, doing Data Engineering until the end of this year. After that, I might go into another project, of which, I do not know yet. 🙂 I am quite happy. C’est fini, la tristesse.

Cheers, and have a good week ahead!

Fiesta Filipiniana in Le Triadou, France

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My friends and I, together with the Philippine Honorary Consul to Occitanie, Jeffrey Cabuay, went on a trip to Le Triadou, in the South of France to attend a Filipiniana Festival and Art Exhibit. This is a Philippine Festival featuring a programme with Philippine folk dances, and folk songs. There was also an art exhibit, where my artist friends and I contributed some artworks.

The event was organized by the Filipino association, “Tanglaw” (Guiding Light), with members mostly living in Montpellier, France, and around the area.

It was very refreshing to see young people (Filipino students) being very active in the event. There were also some participants and guests from surrounding European countries. It was all very entertaining, relaxing and enjoyable. Even the variety of Filipino food being sold at lunch time were delicious! I had such a great time in this event.

Here are the watercolor artworks I have submitted for the exhibit:

You can get more information about them here:

https://springfugue.com/pahiyas

https://springfugue.com/gumamela

https://springfugue.com/paintings

Also mentioned in my vlog:

https://phinaymarket.com for shopping online Filipino items https://www.zazzle.com/store/springfugue for shopping my online Filipino themed artworks

Thanks for dropping by and have a good day! 🙂

Face Detection App Deployment on Heroku

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Yesterday, we had our group’s meeting with our Python Machine Learning Labs teacher to update him with the progress of our project. We are building a Face Detection Application that we could either deploy on the web or as a mobile application. For my part, I used my Data Science (DS) classmate’s model that was pre-trained on SSD MobileNet V2 FPNLite 640×640 with 50000 steps (~0.7s per step)​ for my web app deployment.

Here is a snippet of the meeting’s recording, showing the part where I presented my work on react.js web app that I have deployed in Heroku using Github workflow actions, something we recently learned this week on our DevOps class.

The teacher was not happy with react.js app due to the overhead of the browser. Heroku was also not the best place to deploy the web app. He was also a bit confused about my colorful bounding boxes coz I was randomizing a list of color codes to display it. He thought it was some error with the detection. LOL! He suggested instead that we go with AWS technologies, Lambda functions in particular, and use Python instead. I think that this was a good exercise for me, and the group. Even though, we are not going to use this deployment in our project, it was interesting to use what I have learned this week in our DevOps class on the subject of CI/CD, and using Github workflow actions. 🙂

Here is the link to the Heroku deployment, if you want to check it out: https://diversity-face-detection.herokuapp.com/

Note that the app takes some time to load, and you will have to allow access to your camera. Also, sometimes, you might need to reload the page to see the bounding boxes.