Mis Experiencias en el Extranjero: Gibraltar!

Love Spain? Of course! Love the UK? Why, yes, yes I do! Want to go to both at the same time and see monkeys? HECK YES! I wanted to visit Gibraltar ever since I knew I was coming to Spain and was intent on finding a way to make it a reality. It's only 4 hours away from Sevilla; however, getting there with public transportation is a nightmare! The bus schedule would have allowed me to visit the city (it's a city, but it's really technically it's own country!) for a whole 3 hours, so I was pretty much decided it wasn't worth the money and gave up on going. Enter Erasmus Student Network! It's a network for students in Erasmus (obviously), which is the major study abroad program for European students. They planned a trip to Gibraltar on November 12 and all I had to do was sign up! It was like a dream come true! I am so luckily that this opportunity fell into my lap!

I took an 8am bus from Universidad de Sevilla and was initially pissed because the friends I had agreed to go with never showed up and I was left alone! However, it was a blessing in disguise! I met a new friend from Germany named Lukas and I was able to spend the whole day speaking German and meeting new people! When we arrived at Gibraltar (which is basically just a huge rock with some sort of city built around it), I was initially taken aback. In my head, I just imagined that we would cross the border and it would instantly look like London. That was rather foolish since we were still in Andalucia and the city looked rather Spanish. We took the cable car up to the top of the rock to see the great views of southern Europe and northern Africa and we had great views...of a grey cloud. However, the presence of wild Barbary apes more than made up for the poor weather! They were hilarious! Within 5 minutes of being up there, one monkey had stolen a map out of a girl's bag (and then dropped it after she threw her bag up in the air and ran screaming) and another latched onto some guy's leg and was pulling on his key chain of a monkey! We had 4 hours on the rock (which was kind of too long) and 1 hour in the city (which was too short - but nothing in Spain is ever planned very well or logically). So Lukas and I just wandered around the rock, trying to catch a glimpse of something more interesting than a cloud, climbing around on the abandoned casemates, and watching some idiot guidos trying to feed the monkeys some bread (actually, the biggest idiot was our bus driver, who wanted people to pour water into the ear of a sleeping monkey to see what it would do...)! It was a cool experience. Then we walked around the city and got some fish and chips at the Lord Nelson Pub (so I was at least able to experience something British)! The cold and cloudy weather definitely put a damper on the visit, but the monkeys were fascinating to watch and the whole experience was very unique! I'm definitely glad everything worked out and I was able to visit! Thanks Erasmus Student Network!