I spent the morning taking my online Responsible Service of Alcohol (pretty much essential for bar jobs) and Food Handling Retail and Hospitality courses. It's almost a scam to get money off you, because the website I got mine off gives you the money back if you fail (which is pretty much impossible given you get unlimited goes at the questions, and gives you the link to the notes before and after you answer the questions). The food one is more about cooking the food, so I'm not sure how relevant this will be for the jobs I apply for, and was quite similar to the one I took for me and Mel's cake sale.

I got the paid bus into town (the free shuttle bus didn't leave until 2, and I wanted to get going and do my errands, but no way was I walking in the heat- I got so sweaty yesterday!).

I went a bit crazy with the printing- I had wanted to do 100 copies of my CV and 15 each of the standardised covering letters for café waitressing, restaurant waitressing, food attendant, bartending and sales advisor, but I didn't realise how big a stack it was going to be! I got it done in a big computer and stationery shop, and they had hole punches and staplers available, so it took me a while to staple the pieces together. I had to buy some new document wallets to fit them all in. (Just realised this is a mum style blog and I'm wittering on about really uninteresting, mundane things… you better get used to it though as we're not going to be sightseeing for a while!)

I asked the woman at reception for my dinner voucher (because I hadn't worked to get it yet) and also asked whether we could have a break, and she said we could only get one for 8 hours work! So I had to eat my miniscule portion of 'Quiche Lorraine' and coleslaw (which was actually a salty veggie filled omelette, with non-mayonnaise-y salad) at 5. It's made me a bit angry that they can use the fact that backpackers are so in need of jobs that they can make them work 3 hours for the tiniest of meals, when Bex earns $22 an hour at Toys 'R' Us, which is probably the same sort of pay as a cleaner job, and you can get a dorm room for $22 which would mean we could be left with $44, and we could have quite a lavish meal for that! 3 hours of scraping sh*t off toilets in the heat isn't fun- I had massive sweat patches covering my top and trousers. I saw the old man who's staying here (who I couldn't understand a word of when I saw him at the bus stop) in his pyjamas at about 8, which was quite cute. I saw him go in a dorm room so I hope his fellow guests don't come in at 3 in the morning, drunk, and wake him up!