Day 33: There's Been a Change of Plans

When I first spoke to the representatives of the Work and Travel Company, the people organizing this grand endeavor of mine, their pitch was very much like what I head read in their literature back in the states. “Be flexible, your plans will change, be open to new things blah blah blah blah.” Being a willful and stubborn (read: stupid) person, I thought to myself before coming to Australia that once I had set myself on a path that it would just magically work out for me, and that I would have no need to change my plans.

False.

When I signed myself up for Surf Camp in an attempt to gather some stability, a ramshackle plan quickly fell into place behind it. I would return from Surf Camp, ready to buckle down and be a serious adult, and begin heading up the eastern coast of Australia, where the majority of their major cities are kept, looking for work. My first stop was Collaroy, a place that apparently spent all of their advertising dollars painting themselves as a workers’ paradise.

False.

When my first attempt at finding a permanent job yielded no results, I began to wonder if simply changing my location would make the tedious process of blitzing all the businesses in one area with resumes any more fruitful. So I changed my mind, changed my direction, and high-tailed it back down the eastern coast to Sydney, and then kept moving down on to Melbourne. Work and Travel Company had a job posting for a company in Melbourne that required several dozen event staff, and since many of the friends I made in my first week in Australia were already down in Melbourne waiting for the job to start, heading towards guaranteed work was a no brainer.

In a short 24 hours from my arrival, I managed to find a place that was renting out a bedroom thanks to the help of my friend Clarke Miller. My new apartment (it feels pretty cool to be able to say that) is in a north of downtown Melbourne, just of few blocks away from Melbourne University. The most direct route to the city involves traveling down Lygon St., where there are an abundance of cheap restaurants and stores etc. I realized this morning that I’m basically living next to Melbourne’s equivalent of The Ave, which is ironic but also very cool.