Well, the US finally decided to give in on the flight physical. Turns out the Spanish actually were right the whole time, but it doesn't explain why they've accepted the US flight physical for years and suddenly decided not to. Anyway, after receiving my orders from both chains of command, I took a Spanish physical yesterday. As predicted, it was no big deal, but it was wasted time nonetheless. It was a little weird doing the written and oral psych exam in Spanish, but I made it through ok. Now only 4 months until my next physical, the American one, but then I'll be back in the US and do one a year.
In other news, it looks like I won't be getting my shiny new car for 2 more weeks. About 2 weeks ago, the dealer wrote to tell me that the car was in Jerez (near Rota) and that if he could get it registered I could have it by last week. When last week came and went with no word from the dealer, I asked again when we might get the car. The dealer called e today while I was at work and said if we wanted the car so bad we could drive 400 miles out to Jerez, register it ourselves, and drive it back. The other option was to wait 2 more weeks when he would have time to register the car and send it out here. I'd really like to know what he's been doing with himself the last two weeks! It's not a huge loss not to get it this weekend since we're also going to be gone all next week, but it's annoying that the car has spent a month sitting around at the dealership when they could have delivered it to me by now.
Speaking of going away, after checking lots of ofertas for next week, we decided to go back to London. e and I spent a long weekend there in December and had a great time. We're looking forward to being able to see things in a bit more detail now that we have a full week. We decided to go ahead and buy the 3 day London pass. Even though we've already seen two of the biggest attractions on the list--The Tower of London and Westminster Abbey--we figure we can see enough in 3 days to make the pass worth it. I thought for sure I blogged our December trip, but I can't find it in the archives. We're leaving from our local airport, which is nice, and flying to London Stansted on Ryan Air. We'll take the Stansted Express from the airport to the Tottenham Hale station where we'll jump on the tube for the trip to Victoria Station where our hotel is located.
On a final note, San Javier moved into the big time yesterday when they opened up a huge Eroski grocery/department store that has a small mall attached to it. We'll actually be 2 mins away from great shopping and even a Burger King--things we had to drive 30 minutes to find before. We went to the grand opening yesterday with the hordes and thought it was funny to watch the old men in Eroski. They were traveling in groups, and you could tell they had never made the trip to the big stores in Cartagena because they stopped at every end cap to marvel at the 2-meter high stack of detergent boxes. They stared at them open-mouthed as if they had never seen something so amazing before. Life in little ole San Javier will never be the same!
