*****Warning - if you don't like cricket then look way now*****It was Christmas Eve at 5pm. Work was over and that meant one thing - a mad dash to the airport to catch a flight to Melbourne. This was no ordinary Christmas Eve....you see, the England Cricket team were over in Australia attempting to retain the Ashes for the first time in 24 years and there was only one place I would be this Christmas and New Year - cheering them on with the Barmy Army!Since I was ...

If Frank Sinatra would have gone to Mooroopna instead of New York he would have sung about the city that never wakes up. You see, not a lot goes on in Mooroopna. It has a supermarket, a pub, a few little shops and a pizza restaurant amongst some other insignificant places of non-interest. It has a population of 7203 topped up by backpackers. But I'm not here for the social life. I'm here to work and earn money at the local cannery, where I worked last year. I le...

So back to work for two more weeks at Metro Trains. I probably could have worked at Metro longer but the Australian Open was just around the corner and I wanted to have two weeks off to watch the tennis. This was to be my last month in Melbourne before going back to Mooroopna to work at the Cannery again. I was determined to enjoy it and do as much as I can before I left. I and a couple of friends did a day trip to Sorrento & Portsea, south of Melbourne. Sorr...

And so the Melbourne adventure continues……I completed my two week assignment at the Royal District Nursing Service in St Kilda and after a few further weeks looking for a job I finally managed to secure a temporary contract working in the HR department of Metro Trains Melbourne, the company that was taking over the franchise for running the entire train network in Melbourne. By a strange coincidence, one of my friends was already working at the train company ...

Back to Melbourne then! I had toyed with giving Adelaide a go for a few months but decided that I loved Melbourne so much that it had to be my first choice. I had had so much fun there the previous two times I had been there in January and May and now I was on my second year visa it was time to try and ‘settle’ somewhere for a while. Perhaps until Christmas. Of-course this was reliant on getting work in Melbourne and I was hoping the situation had improved si...