Dear Reader (haha, I sound like a Sunday times columnist)
Again sorry for the slow update. It's been a month of cliff hangers for myself, so why not keep everyone else waited with baited breath for the next chapter? Ha!
In truth, it's just been a pretty busy, stressful and messy month.
We arrived in the drizzle and cold to a glum Melbourne on the 2nd of Jan at around 6am. I had promised myself never to take a night bus again, but actually, I got some sleep and was less stressful than flying can be sometimes. Our hostel wouldn't let us check in early (an early red flag to the beginnings of a toxic relationship) so I took myself off to see "A Man Called Otto"*.
The next day, myself and my cousin Sarah had a fab night out in Melbourne bar crawling round the lane ways.
The following morning, myself, Kate and our pal Joe we had met on the Kiwi Experience bus, met up and devised a cunning plan where we would look for a share house together. Wahoo! Or so we thought. What followed was an intense couple of weeks where we ran ourselves ragged, going to close to 30 house viewings, writing beautiful cover letters that would rival Shakespeare's work and basically begging estate agents to let us live somewhere. Alas, our hard work was slightly in vein as every mandatory house viewing pitted us against about 50 other hopefuls who's credentials were much better than 3 foreigners without much employment between them. Most the time, they wouldn't even look at our paperwork as all of our 8 (yes, 8) different references were foreign. We were tired and our bulletproof optimism was deflated. In the end, we decided that splitting up would help as there were lots of rooms in already established share houses going. A lot of them would be more off the record too which would mean we stood a higher chance of getting somewhere. This plan worked nicely, myself and Kate found somewhere within a week together and Joe in two.
While all of this was going on, we were bouncing between hostels. We left the first hostel, much to my relief, and moved to another in St. Kilda, which was much more homely and, thankfully cheaper. The Australian Open was now on, and rooms were in excess of $80 (£37) a night in the city and double the price of our first week. In our downtime between house viewings we looked for jobs and hung out at the beach. Kate had managed to arrange for us to volunteer in exchange for our accommodation back at hostel 1, so we headed back there after a week. I really didn't want to go back, but glad we did as we ended up in a better room and saved a lot of money. Which was great as I still hadn't managed to get a job. We settled into a routine there, my volunteering shift 8pm-9:30/10pm cleaning the kitchen. It meant not being able to go out in the evening, but I was able to swap one night so I could meet up with Scott, one of my ACLE pals, wahoo! There was a group of about 50 or so Fijian men living in our hostel, all working at a meat packing factory. At first I wasn't too sure what to make of them, but had made friends with them by the time I had left. Every evening, they would sit around drinking Kava, a midly narcotic drink they stored in a large bucket and scooped out with a coconut shell.
During the day I job hunted. I thought finding a job would be easy. All of the recruitment agencies seemed to think it would be. So I popped into them and had a couple of interviews and waited and waited. A lot of offices close at the start of January, so I kept being promised that it would pick up next week, but it never did. Eventually, after a couple of weeks of waiting, I marched around the CBD with my CV. Nearly everywhere was hiring and seemed impressed by my cv, but again, despite chasing, I heard nothing. Finally I got a call and had a successful interview to a cafe/restaurant in Port Melbourne. "Great", I thought, "I'll do that until a 9-5 comes my way". It was all going swimmingly until I was randomly fired on day 2. I've never been fired before, and had been doing a good job and working hard. My colleagues thought so too. So I'm not really sure why it happened. I was pretty upset and annoyed, and was starting to question why I had flown to the other side of the world to live to be fired from a job that I didn't really want anyway. But after a cup of tea, I applied for a load more and trundled off to my improv class. More on that later. The following morning, one if the agencies rang to tell me that they were putting me forward for two jobs and I had a call from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) less than two hours after applying for a job. The next day, I interviewed successfully to be a casual Producer on their Breakfast show. Wow. The only snag is the casual element and that my shifts will probably start at 2am, yikes. So I'll have to be careful with fatigue management.
Anyway, sorry if this has been a bit boring and gloomy. Here's some cool stuff that's happened.
I've essentially been 'adopted' by Impro Melbourne, a improv theatre in the city. I'm volunteering in exchange for doing two classes a week and making heaps of new friends in the process. Like so many times in my life, Improv is the one consistent thread that keeps going no matter what. It's never intended to be an escape, but provides lots mindfulness, laughter and being silly. You've got to be 100% focused on the scene you are in. I'd deffo recommend improv to anyone because of these reasons. And could wax lyrical for hours about all the soft skills it helps with. But I won't bore you (drop me a dm if you do wanna chat about it!). Anyway, I've had such fun painting and organising their new theatre ahead of opening night and creating social media content. They've even offered to pay me for the latter once I've used up my credits on classes. I really feel I'm going to improve my craft and it's nice to have instant friends to pub with post class.
Anyway, I'm hoping February will be a bit more settled.
*this is based on a Swedish book- "A Man called Ove" that was featured on BBC R4's "A Good Read" when I worked on it, and subsequently done the rounds in our family. David loves it. Though I've never actually read it lol.
Kate's birthday on St. Kilda beach with Meli our room mate and her friends
