Pirate Ship Parties and a U.S. Airshow

The main events from last week:

Last Sunday, my familia invited me to go to an air show with them on the beach here.  My madre packed a little picnic of tortilla Espanola- which is like my most favorite thing here (egg and potatoes fried together- it’s hard to explain)—and some ham flavored potato chips (since that’s what they eat here) and we went off to the beach.  The air show was actually pretty cool, but I thought it was freakin hilarious because the airplanes in the airshow were American military planes!  The military base at Rota is super, super close, so the planes in the show were basically from home!   I thought it was pretty funny.  But yeah, we sat and watched this cool airshow and ate Spanish food in front of a castle on the beach in the sun all day- not too shabby of a way to spend my Sunday. 

Where we set up our picnic to watch the airshow...

Last Wednesday, we received an invite (like a real paper invite) to a cocktail party with the Italian navy officers-in-training, who had been in town for a couple of days.

Cocktail party invite

Basically, they have this pirate ship that they take around for 3 months every summer and do training stuff on it and go from port to port, and then they have a cocktail party to celebrate the end of their tour in Cadiz.  Since it sounded like a legit adventure, we decided to go but planned on jumping off if the boat started to leave port and head for Morocco or somewhere to sell us for slaves… So yeah, we got all dressed up and went out to Mexican for a friend’s birthday, where we had sangria Mexicana-- slightly frozen sangria blended up with tequila… yeah.  The makings of a good night right there.  We left there definitely ready to party on a pirate ship. 

I am in no way kidding when I say this is the boat we partied on.

We got escorted up the plank of the pirate ship by some nice Italian navy boy and walked into a crowd full of Italian navy officer guys.  If you know me at all, you’d know that I was a happy camper at that moment in time.  On the ship there were two dance floors complete with djs, a few open bars, a buffet full of crab and cheese classy treats, a real, gourmet cake, some champagne toasts and many, many foreign men in uniform.   Needless to say, it was a nice time.  Me and my girlfriends taught some of them how we dance in America, which was hilarious- apparently we were the first Americans some of them had ever met. 

Us with some of our Italian friends

I’m pretty sure the US and Italy are going to have a better relationship now, thanks to us.  They were all just really sweet boys who danced with us all night and gave us some tours of the ship, which was really cool.  At like 3 or so a few of them decided to be gentlemen and walk us home, something completely unnecessary in Cadiz but still a very nice gesture.  My night ended with an invite to Mallorca this weekend to visit them and hangout on the boat some more, but I think that I’m gonna have to decline this time haha

My next post will be about Portugal, and then I’ll be caught up!