Gibraltar!

This past Friday me and six other girls from UNH went on a weekend trip to Gibraltar and then Morocco. It was a prepaid trip through the program "We Love Spain", and in total there were about 200 other people on the trip but we all were split up into groups of 40-50 on different buses. From Granada, it was a little less than a 4 hour drive to Gibraltar. The drive was a beautiful road alongside the coast of the Mediterranean and beautiful rich towns.
For those of us that paid for the Gibraltar tour, we simply flashed our passports at the border and walked to our tour bus which seemed too easy seeing as I didn't even have my passport out. Our guide's name for the Gibraltar tour was Mike and we all loved his British accent and sense of humor.
Gibraltar is only about 8 km squared and has around 35,000 inhabitants. It's a beautiful island with lots of palm trees and bright blue water. It's located at the point where the Mediterranean and Atlantic meet.
Our first stop was at the caves of St. Michael's. The drive there was on the side of the Gibraltar rock, a very steep and windy road. Mike told us that when we got out there would be monkeys and that it's important that we don't feed them because there's a huge fine, but a second later a monkey jumps through the window because he was holding out peanuts! After we went through the caves, he said we could play with them.
The caves are vast and go very far down into the rock of Gibraltar. It used to be thought that the monkeys arrived to Gibraltar through the caves because they thought them to be never ending and connected to the top of Africa. However this isn't true, the monkey's were brought over by ships and pirates way back in the day. Stalagmites cover the ceiling and all of the caves were formed by nature and water over thousands of years. Today one of the large caves is used for classical concerts and has a nice stage and rock seats.
After we exited the caves, we got to play with the monkeys as promised. Mike would hold out a peanut and a monkey would jump up on his arm and he would pass it to the next person. I got to enjoy a nice monkey on my shoulder, but afterwards I felt a little gross because it smelled faintly of pee. There were a bunch of adorable baby monkeys as well but were not as comfortable with people unfortunately, so I did not get to hold one. We next drove to Ape's Den where we played with some more monkeys, but these ones weren't as nice. They are still wild, so it shouldn't have been that surprising. One kid had dreds and the monkeys kept chewing on his beads in his hair. Other monkeys pulled hair and ate it when they were on top of other people's shoulders which I found slightly amusing since it wasn't me. One girl was nicely posing with a monkey as it casually started to pee all over her jacket. I erupted into laughter of course, but the poor girl was mortified. It wasn't that big of a deal because her jacket is waterproof and pee is sterile, but she took it off and laid it on a rock to dry for the 5 minutes we had left. When she tried to leave a monkey, probably the same monkey that pissed on it, grabbed her jacket and made a run for it. He ran down the street a little ways and then hopped over the fence and on this very steep hill/cliff. Our bus driver and Kevin, our trip coordinator, risked their lives and hopped over the fence for this girls jacket. After 5 or so minutes they were able to lure the monkey with peanuts and grab her jacket. The day was saved.
They importance of the monkeys to Gibraltar goes back to the days Britain started its reign over the island. It was once said that when all the monkeys leave Gibraltar, so will all the British. Winston Churchill took this so seriously that he had 24 more monkeys brought to Gibraltar to ensure their existence. Today there are about 300. Churchill also wanted to protect them so he enlisted them all in the British army. The hospital that was built for soldiers on the island was built in such a way that no sunlight ever directly hit any of the windows to keep it as cool as possible. After they were enlisted, a wing of the hospital was solely for the health of the monkeys since they were able to receive the same health benefits as all the other human enlistees.
As we headed towards the main part of the city, we saw the courts where John Lennon and Yoko Ono married as well as Sean Connery, twice. We drove down the same narrow windy roads that were filmed for the car racing scenes in James Bond when Sean Connery played 007. Many of the roads are very narrow and some used to be two way streets until a few years ago. This seemed ridiculous since cars park on both sides of the street leaving just enough room for a car to get by; our bus barely made it through, but to them it's no big deal of course. A common saying in Gibraltar is "bumpers are for bumping".
For an two hours we had some free time to wonder around the beautiful city. It was weird being in a native English speaking country, and several times we would ask questions in Spanish. Thousands of Spanish workers cross the border daily to work so it was fine when it was someone Spanish but I thought it was more weird when people would come up and talk to us in Spanish since me and my friends talk in English to each other and don't look Spanish.
We walked back to the buses to continue on our way to the ferry for Morocco. The main road into/out of Gibraltar also serves as a part of the airport's runway. Because of this, there was lots of traffic coming into Gibraltar but exiting was fine. Two hours later we had boarded the ferry and landed in the city of Ceuta, a Spanish city at the tip top part of Africa. Once on the bus we made our way towards the border of Spain/Morocco to continue our trip to Tetouan.