Sydney

After a pretty short flight from Christchrch i arrived in Sydney and found my way to the hostel where a girl i met on the kiwi bus worked. She had arranged for me to get work for accommodation, this basically means you do housekeeping for a set amount of hours a week in exchange for a bed. I figured as i was getting a little bit tight on money it would help me out while i looked for work.

The first few days in Sydney were spent sorting myself out for a long term stay, getting bank accounts set up and getting an australia phone and number. I bought a cheap phone from what seemed like the stone age but it did the trick!

I was pretty thoroughly underwhelmed when i was shown to my room, it was on the top floor of the hostel, aka the attic, and didn't even have plastered ceilings. The whole hostel was disgusting and absolutely over run with cockroaches! Not fun! As well as this the work for accomadation was atrocious, we had to work under a group of Nepalese women who didnt speak a word of english to you and just pointed and grunted and were very rude. Cleaning toilets and accidentally walkingg in on people in *ahem* the throws of passion was not what i had envisaged of my time in Oz! Luckily i got a job on my 6th day there so i quit/was apparently fired from my cleaning job! I moved into the normal rooms in the hostel which were only marginally better than the staff floor.

It was good that i didn't have the 18 hours of cleaning work anymore as managed to land a job which gave me around 60 hours a week! The pay was incredible considering i was just a bar tender in a posh seafood grill restaurant so i was happy.

For the next 2 months i basically worked my little bum off working all hours under the sun... Who knew bar tenders could be needed to start work at 7am!! I learnt how to make coffees thanks to these breakfast shifts which was really fun and a good skill to have so it all worked out well! The 15 hour days did start to get the better of me though and i started to resent the job a bit. Luckily the manager was nice and when i explained that my boyfriend was coming to visit me at Christmas having served a tour in Afghanistan he agreed to lower my hours. So i only had to work Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Years Eve and New Years Day.... What a great guy. (Please sense the sarcasm!!!)

I explored around the beaches with Amie who was on my kiwi bus and met up with me in Nomads. We spent the rare day off that i got on Bondi or Coogee beach but as I workked such crazy hours i didn't really have time to enjoy Sydney very much.