Gibraltar

So yesterday was my first day in La Linea, which I spent walking around with Tatiana and Esteban, a couple from southern california who are also in the program. The city itself is...interesting, for lack of a better word. When people describe La Linea they often say "it is not your typical Spanish town" and I can see why. The city is very working class, and a lot of people are unemployed. The very center of the city is cute, lots of cafes with people eating tapas and drinking coffee. As you get outside of it it becomes more run down. It looks like it was on the upswing as a resort town and then the economic crisis hit and everything was left where it was. So there is a beautiful beach lined with palm trees and a nice sidewalk that a lot of people run and bike on. But then one block in it looks a lot like Peru, which is not something you generally expect of a European city. A huge percentage of the people here work in Gibraltar, and there are lines of cars up the street along the water every morning of workers waiting in line to get through the border, which is literally a 5 minute walk from the center of La Linea. I only have 9 minutes of internet so I will write more on La Linea as I learn more. In the afternoon yesterday I took a bus out to the community of Santa Margarita, which has newer houses and is pretty purely residential. I am couch surfing there with a Finnish and Hungarian couple in their earlir 30s who have traveled all around the world and currently work in Gibraltar. We chatted and had dinner and a few friends of theirs came over, and Italian and Hungarian couple. They told me about a gym near my school that has tennis and padel, which apparently is a combination of squash and tennis. So obviously I am going to join this gym and learn padel. Today I walked to Gibraltar with Tatiana and Esteban. Very British, with banners celebrating the Queens Jubilee and everything in pounds and pence. It is very beautiful there, and cigarettes and alcohol and chocolate are all very cheap. Apparently a big business is smuggling cigarettes over the border to sell in Spain. We hiked up to the top of the rock, which had gorgeous views of the Atlas mountains in Morocco and the strait of Gibraltar, which was full of barges heading toward the Atlantic. There were the monkeys, which were a little freaky but very cute, and a plethora of lizards and olive trees.



Time to sign off, love to all of you wonderful readers! Jordan