I´ve recently changed jobs. I always hate doing that because you´re jumping into the great unknown, but I have to say that I am not a job hopper and every time I´ve done it, it has been the right move.
I´m not going to talk about my work though. This blog is sooooo not about work. I like to keep the two separate, but I thought it would be a good idea to let people know just what it means to work in Gibraltar. It´s very different from Toronto, New York, London etc. For starters, there is no subway.
When I leave the house every day I go through the regular routine of checking that I have everything I need. But since starting work in Gibraltar the most essential item that I check for every day is my passport. I don´t think much of it now. I mean I imagine myself in Toronto, getting ready to go to work in the morning and thinking “Oh, don´t forget your passport” and I think yeah, it´s kind of weird. My passport like many others, stayed in my drawer until I decided to take a holiday or something. Now? I show my passport every morning to border guards crossing from Spain to Gibraltar and again when I leave at the end of the day. I take my passport everywhere I go. JR´s too.
My path to work also involves crossing a runway. Every day after I cross the border, I cross an actual live runway used by airlines like EasyJet and British Airways. It takes about 3 minutes to cross on foot. It is usually very windy because it is open on both ends looking out to sea. If there is a plane coming in or leaving, the barriers go down, the gates are closed to pedestrians and the cars and people start to pile up waiting for the plane to land or take off. I have to say that it is very cool to be that close to a commercial jet when it is taking off. It´s pretty loud and it takes about half a second for it to pass by you. It´s even cooler when you get the military jets taking off. They ascend at a ridiculous speed.
The next big difference that I can think of is the local animal life. In Toronto there were so many squirrels running around, gathering nuts and running up trees. I knew one girl who thought of them as rats with furry tails. Then there are the Raccoons which you don´t see as much of, but I do remember once seeing one frantically trying to figure out how to get off the top of the moving garbage truck it had managed to somehow get on to. I watched all this from our second floor balcony. It´s still not as interesting as seeing monkeys hanging out in the garbage bins though. Or hopping over car roof tops. Yup. Monkeys. Barbary apes to be exact, except that they are actually monkeys because they found out later that they have these itty bitty tails that are hard to see. They still call them apes though. Ape, monkey. It´s still weird to see a family of them when you´re looking for a place to park your car before work. It doesn´t happen every day, but it does happen.
So next time you wake up and start getting ready to take the subway to work imagine yourself making sure you have your passport to show to the border guards, stopping at a runway and watching a plane take off before you have to cross it, and seeing a few monkeys along the way to work. And welcome to my life.
Posts
