The first few months in Australia...

Thought it was probably about time I wrote a new blog again, it's been about 4 months since the last one and I guess no one's checking for updates anymore! Colm and I arrived here on the 2nd March at about midday. We thought we might have a hard time getting through the notoriously strict Australian border security but we breezed through and got a bus into Melbourne. We headed to St Kilda, a Melbourne suburb on the seafront. We only stayed one night at the first hostel we found, it wasn't a great place and they only had space for us for the one night. The next day we moved hostels, seemed like a nicer place on the face of it, the rooms were bigger, the kitchen seemed clean enough, foxtel and decent showers. We met up with a few of Colm's mates over the next few days who'd been in Australia for a while. We spent a few days applying for all sorts of jobs but not really getting any worthwhile replies. We finally rang the harvest line number and they put us in touch with a campsite who got us a grape picking job so we thought we'd give it a whirl. Got the train up to Swan Hill for $30 and had to wait around for 4 days because it was raining. When we did finally go picking we were on a shocking wage, worked out at about $4.50 an hour which is about 3 quid, slightly below minimum wage we thought so we only stayed for a couple of days. While we were up there Colm rang another Colm he knew and got us a job in Melbourne with him so we hot footed it back on the train to the bright lights of Melbourne and started work the next monday. The night before we started work Simon turned up at the hostel, a day earlier than we were expecting him, bit of a miscommunication somewhere, still not sure how it happened. Colm and I started work the next day at Entertainment Publications sending books conhtaining money off vouchers out to all the kids in Melbourne schools and if they didn't want them they sent them back. It was easy work and fairly good money for what we were actually doing. Simon tried looking for jobs over the next few weeks but didn't really get anywhere, in the end we managed to get him some work with us when it was busier for a few weeks. We managed to do a few things whilst we were in Melbourne, we went to the Australian Grand Prix in Alfred Park which was pretty cool, and we caught the end of the Melbourne comedy festival for Simon's birthday. I flew up to Brisbane for a weekend to see Ian which was a bit wierd but we had a great time. After that I carried on working at Entertainment and Simon and Colm went up the QLD/NSW border to work on a farm for 6 weeks seeding wheat and Chick Peas. By the time they got back to Melbourne I'd been there for nearly 4 months and since the boys had the car for getting to the farm we decided it was time to leave and see a bit of the country. So we packed up everything and off we went west towards Adelaide, Perth and Simon's unsuspecting relatives.