This past weekend, seven of us Americans took a trip down to Gibralter. We traveled by bus through Andalusia. Andalusia is the southern part of Spain that is next to both the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. From what I saw, it is pretty mountainous and very rural. There are a lot of cattle farms (or ranches, I suppose). The coast is amazing. The water is a deep aqua blue and there are many beaches.
Gibralter itself is a tiny (just over two square miles) British territory. So people there speak English. It is strategically located at the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the sea between Gibralter and the country of Morroco in Africa is called the Strait of Gibralter. Gibralter is interesting because it is basically a huge rock on a peninsula. Actually it's more like a mountain than a rock. Because it is at such a strategic location, it has been used by various militaries and has about 50 kilometers of tunnels inside of it as well as some natural caves. We toured some of these caves and tunnels while we were there. It is also the only place in Europe that has wild monkeys.
So we went there this weekend. We walked to the border from our hotel in the Spanish city of La Linea, showed our passports, walked across the only runway of the only airport of this tiny country, and promptly got lost in the small city in Gibralter. So we eventally stumbled upon a plaza with restaraunts and ate some food. I ate some excellent lamb and kous kous. Afterward we had planned to take a taxi to the cable car station to ride to the top and look around. However events conspired against our plans, and instead of taking a taxi to the cable car and taking the cable car to the top of the mountain and walking back down under the hot sun, we took an air-conditioned minivan tour of the island. We drove through the nature reserve, saw some monkeys, wandered through caves and tunnels, went to the beach, and took pictures of everything. Oh yeah, we went out on a boat and saw some dolphins in the harbor. The boat just followed the dolphins around the harbor while they were sleeping and feeding.
So we came back to Cadiz on Sunday, and I promptly went to the beach again and stayed until about 7:45pm. Then I came home and tried to sleep.
Today we are working in the lab again. I am still running extractions, but will probably be done with that by tomorrow. We started analyzing our lichens for fatty acids, and will start analyzing them for proteins. The point is to find the percentage of proteins and fatty acids that the lichens contain. By the end of the week, we plan to start doing bioassays with the material we extracted. This means that we will plant some of the lichen extracts with lettuce seeds. We will watch the seeds grow and see if the material from the lichens helps the plant to grow or not.
Some of the girls are planning to go to Paris this weekend. The rest of us are not working on Friday, but have Spanish class in the morning and are going to a bodega which is a place where people make sherry.
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