Nash Attack!

After my hair meltdown, the remainder of October was a combination of busy and boring, at least for me. I use the word "boring" facetiously, as how can life possibly be boring abroad???? What I suppose I mean is that we haven't had any wacky adventures in Kyrgyzstan or some other random country. Since November is our super duper action-packed travel month (Rome and London), we used our October weekends to chill and attend Halloween parties. El had his grad school midterms and is starting to study for his course finals, so life has been busier than usual for him. Me? I've just been tra-la-la'ing through work and life, dreaming of November and opportunities to visit my pagan obsessions.

There were some definite bright spots in October, don't get me wrong. For one, it was the hottest October in the past 30 years in our area, so the weather stayed hot and sunny almost the entire month. I'm talking temps in the 90's leading up to Halloween. Now that it's November, the weather is starting to cool down (low 70's for the high and 50's at night and in the mornings), so it is finally starting to feel like fall. Well, maybe fall in San Diego, but still a fall of some sort! Things are also a lot calmer on base now that NATO'S (and the US's assistance in the) Libyan mission has ended: all the people who were deployed here for the mission have left, and things are back to being quiet. To be honest with you, I don't even remember what it was like here BEFORE the Arab Spring. I know that we got here 2 months before the US involvement in Libya, but those 2 months were so jam-packed with traveling and living without our stuff that it seems like a blur. I guess I didn't have any expectations as to what the base would be like, so when it changed I didn't even notice. I was just getting over my jet-lag and getting used to a) living in Spain b) being a part of a military community c) finding a job d) the fact that buffalo wings are not on Spanish menus. Now that the deployed troops are gone, the hours of different buildings (Nex, library, etc) are back to normal and there won't be quite as many wacky drunk people at base parties (score); it's nice that things are quieter, especially for Elliot. Everyone took on an added workload during that time, so it will be nice for them to get back into a (quieter) normal routine.

When I was a kid, October wasn't exactly my favorite month: days were getting shorter and nights were getting colder, which meant that I would probably have to wear my Bulls Starter jacket underneath my Halloween costume. After living in DC for almost five years, and actually getting to experience fall weather, it's become my favorite month. That and the whole "getting married in October" thang... What I have always appreciated about October (despite some of my favorite people born in that month) is Halloween. My family has always been huge into Halloween, and I love everything about this time of year: haunted houses, candy, costumes, horror movies, people in scantily clad costumes (jk). I'm not going to lie, I was a little bit nervous about not getting to experience all the glories (or GORIES-ba dum dum ching! Is this thing on?) of the season by living in Spain. Lemme tell ya, I was NOT disappointed.

October's Spouses Social was a "Where are you from???" potluck and costume party. I wasn't able to get stuff for my original costume idea (Superfan) in time, so I had to brainstorm another Chicago "figure" to be. Fortunately, I had many to choose from: Al Capone, Michael Jordan, Mrs. O'Leary's cow.... I decided to go practical and clever and went as a Blues Brother. I borrowed Elliot's white dress shirt, black tie and jacket, and I wore my own black suit pants. I bought a crappy hat from the Halloween store, along with sunglasses from the 2 euro store that were as close as I could find to Joliet Jake's and rummaged around the house for random items to accessorize with. I downloaded clips from the movie ("We're on a mission from God"), carried my Guitar Hero microphone around with me, and carried a bag that said "Saint Helen's of the Blessed Shroud Orphanage Donations". If you had seen the movie, my costume was pretty dang good. If you hadn't, I looked like an Orthodox Jewish man. Or a crossdressing stripper. Fortunately, everyone dressed the part of their hometown and there were no repeats. There were some other pretty fabulous costumes like Dolly Parton (Tennessee) and Smokey the Bear (New Mexico), and the food was nothing less than delicious. Since I can't exactly air-mail Lou Malnatti's overseas (but you can within the States: http://www.tastesofchicago.com/), I somehow rummaged all the ingredients for Chicago-style hot dogs, down to the celery salt. The Nex only had regular hot dog buns, so I brushed them with oil and rolled them in poppyseeds to complete the process. I was even able to find Plochman's mustard! I must say, they turned out pretty awesome. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but BEEP BEEP.

We also attended a few Halloween parties where I dressed as Rosie the Riveter, and the base put on some pretty kick-ass Halloween festivities for both the kids and the adults. One of the things we participated in was the house decorating and trick-or-treating the Friday before Halloween. Each of the flights on base was assigned a carport of an unoccupied house on base to decorate and pass out candy at. After the kids' party, all of the kiddos (including the kids of Spanish workers) went through the base housing to trick or treat. LG's decorations look pretty nice, but some other flights really went nuts with the decorations, having fog machines, flashing lights and animatronic decorations. The house El and I were at looked a bit sad in comparison, but it was still fun. The kids looked adorablle, especially the Spanish kids who learned how to say "trick or treat" for the occasion. While Halloween is celebrated in Spain, the custom of trick-or-treating hasn't quite swept the nation yet. The wise ones have already figured out where the Americans live in Utrera and La Ramira and go trick or treating at those houses. After the kids came around, Jessie and I went through the haunted (base) house that the Booster Club put on. Holy hell, they did a great job! It was a legit haunted house, and I screamed louder than the little kids who were there with me, permanently scarring my non-chicken shit reputation.

In addition to the November trips, I had my cousin Heather and her husband Adam's visit to look forward to at the beginning of the month. Heather is a year older than me and also went to Iowa, so we have always been close. Her and Adam are both hilarious and fun as hell, so it definitely made for a fun visit. After spending a few days wandering around Sevilla and Utrera, we all took a weekend road trip along the southern coast to Cadiz, Gibraltar and Malaga.

Before they came, I would give Elliot crap for always taking our visitors down to Cadiz. "Why do you always take people down to Cadiz?", I would nag, "there's nothing to DO there!" Well, turns out I was wrong and there IS heck of a lot to do there besides the tried and true cathedral and beach route. It also turns out that visitors DO want to visit Cadiz, as Adam and Heather specifically requested to stop there. We booked a little boutique hotel that was right in the middle of Old Cadiz, and we got there early Friday evening. Elliot and Adam dropped us off at the hotel and went to find parking, as the hotel was on a narrow pedestrian street. Heather and I checked in and kept laughing over the paperweight that was attached to our room keys. In Europe you still will often get actual key keys for rooms, rather than them new-fangled plastic ones that the Americkeys use (spits into spatoon-TING!). The thing looked like a library stamp... if library stamps could cause serious head trauma. While Heather and I were waiting in the lobby for the boys, we made scenarios about beating up would-be muggers with our room key, and joked that we were going to make the boys carry the room key in their back pockets. To do so would probably permanently throw off their gait. When the boys got back, Heather laughed and went to hand the key to Adam to show him how heavy it was, only to drop onto the glass table in front of us. We all stood in disbelief and silence and just stared at the now-shattered table. When the front desk guy rushed over to start cleaning up the shards of broken glass, the reality of what happened seemed to hit me and Heather at the same time. In typical "our family" mode, our reaction was to want to burst out laughing. Not wanting to incite any hotel-man wrath, we tried our hardest to hold it in, faces turning red in the process. The guy was super nice about it and said it wasn't a problem, so we retreated to our two rooms and both burst out laughing when we were safely out of earshot. Of course the Americans cause doom and destruction when they come to Cadiz. And of course they were members of the Farrell/Goss family. Haha It must happen quite a bit though, as they immediately replaced the glass with a spare sheet they had in a storage closet.

After the King Kong incident, we roamed the streets of Cadiz, tapas crawled and checked out the shops that were still open. I'm not sure what the occasion was, but all the stores in downtown Old Cadiz stayed open until midnight that night and had some mega sales. Heather picked up a purse (and in hindsight, I should have as well) and we meandered in and out of local bars (including one that looked like it hadn't been updated in 50 years) and walked along the coast before hitting the hay in our (one glass table missing) hotel rooms.

The next day, we climbed the tower in the Cathedral, walked through the excavations in progress house and walked down the long wooden pier to the fortress that jutted out into the water. The wind was in full force, so the walk down the pier was a bit of a treacherous one. The wooden pier was relatively narrow, and any large wave would send up a torrent of water over it. With the luck of the Irish at our heels, we made it all the way to the fortress, found out it was closed to public, and almost all the way back to the beach without getting wet when a monster wave came out of nowhere and completely drenched me, Heather and Adam. Chivalry is most certainly not dead, as Adam tried to catch the brunt of it to save us girls (Elliot was a little bit ahead of us, since he walks faster). Out of the 3 of us, he was the only one who saw it coming as Heather and I were oblivious to anything and gave out a pathetic girl scream when we got hit. Soaked and cold, we headed back to the car and made our way to Gibraltar, hoping for a less National Lampoon's vacation experience.

The weather cooperated for us, and we were able to get some beautiful pictures of the rock, the city below us and of Africa across the sea. It was a little windy, but our tour guide told us that the wind prevented the clouds from forming around the top of the rock, allowing us to get some pretty epic pictures. I'm not sure if that was all BS, but it sounded scientific so we believed him. The tour guide on this trip to Gibraltar was a lot more informative than the one we had back in February, and he even took us to the lighthouse point where we could get a picture at the base of the rock and see better out over Africa. He also pointed out facts about Gibraltar's economy, layout, imports, exports and a whole bunch of other random, fun facts about Gibraltar (like the first neandrathal woman was found in Gibraltar, before the one in Neander, Germany). He even broke down the types of places of religious worship in Gibraltar, showing us a picture of the different religious leaders with their hands together in the middle of a circle ala a Saved by the Bell high five. He said that they all respect each other's religions and get along well because they have a common enemy. Expecting him to say something goofy like "Outrageous cell phone plans!" (thanks, Heather), we were a bit taken aback when he replied, "The Spanish". He then went on a mini-tirade about how the Spanish kept them prisoner for years and won't allow them to use their air space, while we and the Norwegian guys with us all exchanged nervous "Is this guy for real?" looks. It was the most perfect example of silence being golden.

After St. Michael's Caves and more slams on Spain by our trusty tour guide, our next stop was the area where the monkeys hang out. There were a lot more monkeys than our first time in Gibraltar, leaving us with some pretty fantastic photo opps. After MONKEYING AROUND for a bit, we hopped back into the van to go to the WWII tunnels. Just as we were about to leave the van, I noticed a small monkey turd that had been smeared on my jeans. Ironically, the first word out of my mouth was "SHIT!". Having just left the only bathroom on the Rock back at St. Michael's Caves, I had no choice but to go into the tunnels with a monkey's protein submarine on my right thigh. Needless to say, I did not enjoy the tunnels nearly as much as I did the first time; I kept being paranoid that I was smearing the hershey squirt further into my pant leg every time I walked, and I couldn't figure out why I could smell it so strongly when it was on my leg. After stopping to attempt a clean-up with pieces of paper from my blog journal, a light bulb appeared over my head, much like in cartoons. I lifted up my purse to look at the bottom and VOILA, the source of the smell. When I had put down my purse to take a picture of me pretending to eat nits off a monkey, I had successfully avoided all non-BM spotted areas and found one covered in monkey butt-butter to rest my purse on. Despite the monitor at the head of the tunnels supplying me with wet and dry paper towels, the stain and smell still prevailed on my jeans and purse. Fortunately, our tour guide had spray and paper towels in his van, and Elliot got to prove his love for me by helping wipe monkey shit off his wife. That's amore....

We managed to avoid excrement the rest of our time in Gibraltar, and enjoyed some quality English pub fare and beers before walking back to our hotel in Spain. Heather and I amused ourselves with some quality semi-buzzed Full House trivia on the walk back with each other, while our husbands walked a few steps ahead, pretending not to know the weirdos behind them...

Oh, and the purse? Yeah, I threw that shit away.