Gibraltar. Or, as some of us are wont to call it: Gill-batar. Look, I have difficulty with these things. And, as it turned out, I heard someone else on Gibraltar calling it Gill-batar while I was there. One assumes a common difficulty. I won't call it a "mistake." It's not like I don't know Gill-batar is wrong. It's just at the moment when my tongue and brain are required to co-ordinate, they occasionally go off in different directions.
What do you know about this rock? Of course, the iconic shape will immediately spring to mind.
But did you know it is British territory? It was captured by the British in 1704 and in deeded to Britain by Spain "in perpetuity" under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Spain, to this day, continues to assert a claim to the territory. The Gibraltarians resoundingly rejected proposals for Spanish sovereignty in 1967, and again in 2002. As of the Gibraltar constitution of 2006, Gibraltar governs its own affairs, though some powers, such as defense and foreign relations, remain the responsibility of the UK Government.
So, we went from Spain to Morocco to England all in a hop skip in a jump.
Did you also know Gibraltar is known for its semi-wild Barbary Macaques? We referred to them as "monkeys" until one broke into our hotel room. Then we had other, less polite words for them. In the interests of verisimilitude, the break in was my fault. This did not stop me from heaping vitriol on the Macaques.
And the less said about "semi-wild" the better. They are only semi-wild because the taxi drivers who drive the tourists up the mountain hand feed them so they will climb all over the tourists for "great" photographs. Ugh.
Another interesting Gibraltar tidbit: the word "Gibberish" is thought to come from Gibraltar. Why you ask? Because the locals here have an interesting habit of mixing Spanish and English during their conversations. Gibraltarians will often start a sentence in Spanish and switch to English halfway through, making it difficult for non-locals to follow. Gibberish. Possibly apocryphal story, but interesting.
Other fun tidbits about Gibraltar: it's an island, but there is a causeway you drive on to to get there. There are exactly four parking spots on the entire island reserved for tourists, so I don't actually recommend driving there, but we ended up arriving fairly late in the evening, so we were a bit pressed for time. We were staying at "The Rock" hotel, a superb location crammed up on the side of the mountain, although the hotel itself is looking as though its time for a sprucing up. 
Being jammed up on the side of the mountain, the Macaques use it as a thoroughfare. Look! There goes a monkey butt, now! They were crawling around on our deck while we were getting ready to go out in the morning. There are signs that warn you not to go out there an attempt to communicate with them. I am totally down with that. Wild animals belong in the wild and are not lap dogs.
What I failed to realize is how very clever the monkeys are. I (stupidly) left the door to our balcony unlocked. I didn't think much of it, as the hotel is jammed into the side of a cliff. It's not like some cat burglary was going to scale the hotel in broad daylight to break into my room from the balcony: he would have been spotted by someone over in Spain in an instant.
The monkeys, cleverer than the likes of me, can open the doors. One (or possibly more? I didn't ask to view the security camera) broke into our room and ate the complimentary sugar and powdered coffee. That was one jacked up monkey, let me tell you.
One last fun tidbit about the exterior of Gibraltar (we'll explore the interior tomorrow). Below you see the airport. Actually, you are looking out over Spain, and then there is a causeway that even I can't quite pick out, then you come to the large macadam surface with the red and white stripes. That's the airport. Do you see the black arrow I cleverly inserted onto the photo? It's pointing to the road. That is the only road in and out of Gibraltar. It goes right through the only runway on Gibraltar. Do the Gibraltians, in addition to speaking Gibberish play a perpendicular game of Russian Roulette every time they drive into town, you might wonder?
No, of course not. Because Winston Churchill Avenue (the main road heading towards the land border with Spain) intersects the airport runway, it has to be closed every time a plane lands or departs. The History Channel program Most Extreme Airports ranks it as the fifth most dangerous airport in the world and the most dangerous in Europe.
Maybe driving in wasn't such a bad idea after all.
I shall assume this was the ONLY place they could build the road and/or airport. Then again, I live in an area where I question the common sense gene of all the so called engineers every time a new roadway goes up.
Posted by: Debbie Hanson | October 29, 2011 at 07:30 PM