Gibraltar is a bizarre place. It is referred to as a “British Overseas Territory,” because “colony” just doesn’t the same ring to it. Gibraltar sits at the very tip of Europe, a lone English rock in the midst of the Spanish sea (and the Mediterranean sea).

To get to this Anglo-Saxon oasis you must take a bus first to Algeciras, a port city on the edge of Spain, and then take another bus to La Linea, the town adjacent to Gibraltar. After passing through immigration (where our passports were NOT stamped!) and crossing a live air field, we walked into the famous territory.

The city is composed of a hodgepog of quaint British architecture, practical concrete blocks, and ancient stone tunnels and walls. We were quickly disappointed at the lack of accent we heard from the people around us. Everyone was speaking in Spanish! Wasn’t this supposed to be a part of Britain?

Our worries vanished, however, when we heard a woman yelling in a wonderful British accent at her English bulldog as she tried to drag him down the street, “Nelson! You’re being lazy!” Hail Britannia!

We rode the rickety and somewhat terrifying cable car up the side of the rock of Gibraltar, watching the land fall out from beneath us and open up into an incredible vista of ports, blue mountains, and colorful rooftops.

When we reached the top, someone spotted an infamous Barbary macaque, a breed of monkey unique to only the rock of Gibraltar. It sat, nestled in the boughs of a tree, its beige fur waving majestically in the perpetual wind that buffets the top of the mountain. Even from a distance, I could see that it was pure evil.

The cable car erupted in excitement as everyone clamored to take a picture of the trip’s first monkey.

But the eagerness was quelled when the cable car man paused before unlocking the doors.

“Be careful of the monkeys,” he said wisely. “I’m not trying to scare you, but they’re still wild. And dangerous.” He didn’t have to tell me twice.

Which brings me to the survival guide portion of today’s post: Klepto Monkeys

Here are some nuggets of advice to assure that your trip to Gibraltar doesn’t go horribly wrong!

• Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, pull out food in front of the monkeys: They will literally attack you. It got to the point in the day when we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and one of my friends was about to pass out. So she whipped out a muffin from her bag to nibble on, and from across the street, the monkey’s tactical food-vision sensors went off and before any of us knew what was happening, the monkey sprinted over to my friend, scaled up the side of her body and tried to grab the innocent pastry. Natalie, like a ninja, hurled that muffin into the convenient trash can nearby and the monkey leaped off her and onto the receptacle, screeching. She waited to eat until we had made it down the mountain.

• Don’t look like you have food: They will take your bag. When we stepped off the cable car, just moments after the fateful advice of the worker, we had to walk through a terrace that happened to hold three monkeys. Oh, how cute, one of the baby monkeys was gnawing on the rope from a flag pole…he’s probably imagining its your finger. Anyway, there was a man in our lift group who was holding a large green bag with just a corner of another plastic bag showing from within. A monkey skittered across the terrace and leaped into the air at the bag. The man remained impressively calm, and simply moved the bag out of the monkey’s trajectory and walked away. The rest of us, on the other hand, stumbled up the stairs to escape the primate.

• Don’t stare at them for too long: These monkeys are celebrities with high-pressure schedules. The looks and the paparazzi occasionally get to them–sometimes they just want to go the grocery store without wearing makeup, alright! When you stare curiously at them, they stare right back, a challenge in their eyes. Shannon vs. Monkey…that’s not even a fair fight.

• Don’t take your children to the Rock of Gibraltar: You will scar them for life. A family in front of us had paused to look at a baby monkey running around in the trees. Its two parents were on the asphalt, snacking on peanuts from the ground. A little girl reached out her arm to the baby monkey in the trees, and the mother monkey suddenly seized the bottom of the little girl’s jacket and yanked it. The little girl burst into tears and her father moved like he was about to kick the monkey, but a man behind him yelled at him to stop. If he kicked the monkey, they could throw him in jail. All the father could do was hoist up his terrified child and quickly walk away from the victorious monkey parents.

• Exercise extreme vigilance with your passport and credit cards: The monkeys will steal your identity and then go on bank-robbing expeditions and/or wild shopping sprees in Northern Africa and the French Riviera.