Sunday, 04 June 2006

• Greetings from Gibraltar!
  
  The last week has been very intense, but in a good way. It started on monday when I started my 36 hours of travel to Gibraltar. I spent 9 hours in Detroit; it has the nicest airport I've seen, but unfortunately 9 hours in an airport sucks no matter how nice it is. There was a cool fountain there, though:
  
  
  
  After a rousing 7 hour flight to London, I had a 7 hour wait in Gatwick, which resulted in no photos whatosever. It was boring as all get out. Then  my flight to Gibraltar, followed by my first sight of the rock. Since I didn't have my camera out, it looks something like this
  
  
  
  We drove up to Bruce's Farm, the field station in the Upper Rock Nature Reserve that has become our home. It has 8 Bedrooms (most of them double rooms), a wet lab, seminar room, living room, and one hell of a view:
  
  
  
  all that land in the background is Spain
  
  
  
  Also, if you look to the south, you see this:
  
  
  
  That mountain there? That's the other Pillar of Hercules, which is in Morocco.
  
  After a rousing day of field work the following morning, we went into Gibraltar town to get a feel for the place.
  
  
  
  The top of the "Supreme Court" of Gibraltar
  
  
  
  One of the Streets in Gibraltar
  
  
  
  A view of the Rock from town. But of course, all of this is kind of meaningless without the reason for being here, which are these guys:
  
  
  
  
  
  I don't know why this damn thing won't rotate the photo sideways, but that's a barbary Macaque. here are more:
  
  
  
  That larger one is making an aggressive face towards that small one in the bottom of the picture; it appears that the two at the top are more dominant than that one on the bottom.
  
  
  
  That is Giorgio, the oldest monkey at Prince Phillip's Arch. 25 years of taxi drivers feeding him, plus the extensive provisions that GOHNS provides to the macaques has left this guy fat and happy. He really doesn't do much anymore except eat and give high fives to cab drivers. But he kicks ass. We all kept trying to pose like he did and take a photo with the guy. And yes, to those of you who are going to ask which one is the monkey, Giorgio is on the left. I realize there's a strong resemblance.
  
  I'm going to have to leave this post for now, but before I do, here are two photos. The first is from two days ago, when I had to climb to the very top of the rock to survey the monkeys there. It's not *the* peak, but it's high up there. That's also the other side of the rock, the Mediterranean sea.
  
  
  
  The last one was from when we went to La Linea in Spain to go to the beach. You can just see the beach we were at in the photo above, and here's the photo looking back:
  
  
  
  Until next week!
  

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