Writing this, it's hard to believe that I have been living here in Melbourne for over 4 months, especially as we were only planning to stay for a fraction of that time. Maybe it was the brilliant accommodation we had at a very cheap price, or maybe it was because we were both earning very good money at jobs that we both really enjoyed.
Dan had secured himself a job at one of Australia's biggest banks, ANZ, almost as soon as he arrived in Melbourne, although I annoyingly found it a little harder! It took a month, and getting down to my last £40 savings before I finally got a job at a bar. One thing I can say, Australia's daytime TV is no better or worse than the UK's!
I never do things by half though and ended up working in 3 jobs by the time I left Melbourne.
Monday to Friday 9-5 would be spent at a fashion Label called Country Road (www.countryroad.com.au). Although no experience in fashion whatsoever, the agency thought I would be perfect for the job. I must have done something right though as the original 1 week contract lasted for 2 months!
I did anything the design team wanted from working on new patterns, re-colouring fabric, to helping design t-shirts prints for the up and coming Summer collection. Although only a small group worked in my team, I really enjoyed doing something different, and learnt a lot whilst I was there. Who knows I might send my CV off to Calvin Klein when I get home!
Although I could have easily lived on the money Country Road was paying, I had given my word to work for another company a couple of weeks before starting. Because of this, after finishing at 5 I would walk for 40 minutes to another job at Spotlight (www.spotlight.com.au).
I touched on this before, but in case you have forgotten, they employed me after I worked for them through the agency. They must have been happy with my work as they asked me to work for them, but not to tell the agency! I was more than happy with the arrangement. I would turn up at 6, then work by myself till 10 doing basic Photoshop work on images that had been photographed that day. All this was well paid and tax free. Plus because i was by myself, i had full access to the internet, very handy when updating these travelpods. Well how do you think i caught up so quickly?
To finish my working week I would put in a few hours at a bar called 3dregrees (www.3degrees.co.au) although I didn't need to work here for the money, it was nice to mix with different people. It was my first job in Melbourne, so I now knew all the staff very well. Working was more like just meeting up with friends.
It was definitely the best bar I have worked for though. One of those bars that you just like turning up to work for. The manager Mandy was cool about drinking 'mispours' behind the bar, regularly pouring a glass of red! We would also have the occasional 'lock in', some resulting in us walking out at 6am. The best of all though was they let me DJ on a few Friday nights. Not the biggest crowds granted, but still cool and better paid than bar work!
But as you can imagine, working 60+ hours a week is very tiring. So after 3 months of work, it was nice to say goodbye to all these jobs and get back on the road. With the money saved, I hope that it will be a good few months before I have to pour another pint or sit in front of a computer screen to earn those valuable $$$
Other things I got up to in my last month
Traveled 2 hours North of Melbourne, with Tanielle, to a small town called Echuca. The idea was to try wake boarding on a friends boat, hopefully doing a bit better than my first effort in Fiji. But because we overloaded the boat, the engine flooded after the first person trying!
After trying to fix it for an hour, we gave up and waited until Paul's friends turned up with jump leads! The only problem was we actually drained their battery in the process. Now we had 2 broken boats to fix!
Eventually we managed to get the second boat working, so all jumped into that, leaving pauls tied to a tree. It looked like our day of wake boarding was over!
Instead of wakeboarding, we passed the time drinking. We quickly realised that this small speed boat had no chance with 12 adults squeezed into it. So, in true aussie style, one of the guys phoned his dad, who, in about an hour, had delivered their 'booze boat' to us!
Yep, along with the speedboat we were on, and countless other boats, their family actually owned a boat just to have drinking parties down the Murry River on!
So, whilst towing the 2 speed boats behind, we cruised at a leisurely pace back to the boat jetty, getting more and more drunk along the way! Stopping only to let the girls use the toilet on the many house boats we passed. We never did get a go at wake boarding, but we still had a really good weekend never less.
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I also tried in vain to enjoy a game of aussie rules football at the massive 100,000 capacity stadium, the MCG.
Although I tried, I just couldn't get into it, falling asleep at one point! I was more interested in the good looking girls in front! It didn't help that there was only 20,000 people there so it lacked atmosphere, but for $18 (£6) admission, you can't complain. I actually left early - that's how bored I got!
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