Australia - Job searching pain and deciding what to do next

Moin Moin everybody,

It’s Wednesday the 5th of February 2014. I left thetour on Sunday after the Port Arthur visit and went back to the hostel called The Pickled Frog which is very comfortable and colorful (absolutely bright-green from the outside and awesomely colorful inside). I should have made some pictures of it but funny enough somehow I never took pictures of the accommodations that I stayed in.

 

The day after the tour I wrote some more postcards and posted them at the post office in Hobart. As it was very cloudy and slightly raining I went grocery shopping (I got me some nice stuff to treat myself after this exhausting tour) and then back to the hostel. As the Wifi is FREE there and quite fast, I basically spent all morning on the internet. In the afternoon Rebecca who I got to know on the tour joined me in the common area and together we spoke about so many things in between looking on the internet. She was planning her next trips to Singapore, Vietnam and then via Dubai back home to England. She is from Manchester, so we had a lot to exchange about this city as I lived there for 18 months. Thanks to this important chapter of my life my English is very good, I am much more confident in traveling around the world and most importantly I am still in contact with some of the people that I met there and call friends now.

 

 

Anyway, the day past by without any significant event and so I got to bed early. The next morning I skyped with my boyfriend Markus as I rarely had internet connection during the tour, even phone reception was hard to get over a longer period of time. I had to checkout by 10am but spent the time in the common area until my pickup to the airport would arrive. The flight from Hobart to Melbourne went very smoothly and Ichecked into the Nomads All Nations hostel which is well-known to me now. I even got into the same room I stayed in before! But of course completely different people in there.

 

 

Today has almost been the same like two days ago. I spent all morning on the internet in the common room until Laura met me for lunch. We ate together and then spent some time talking and looking things up on the internet until she left. I applied to so many jobs in and around Melbourne but I am not completely sure if I will get a reasonably good and well-paid job in the next few weeks. So I set out an alternative plan as to what to do should I not find a job. I am thinking about flying to Adelaide in two weeks as the flights are quite cheap then and come back to Melbourne after two weeks to give the job searching another chance. Should I not find anything by end of March I might fly to the West Coast and do a tour there as it will be dry season by then and therefore a lot safer to travel. Initially I wanted to fly to Darwin and do the tour going down but it will be autumn or even winter by the time I arrive in Perth and quite cold. I am not really prepared for winter in Australia and would have to buy lots of heavy stuff which would not fit into my little suitcase. Or should I do a coastal trip from Melbourne via Canberra to Sydney so I could visit the actual capitol of Australia and meet mycousin Neio again? Hmmm…

 

 

I really do not know at the moment what to do with myself. Laura will leave Melbourne in two days and I will of course meet with other friends that I found here but most of the time I will spend on my own. This is supposed to be holidays but the job searching is making it feel like something else. Luckily I have still enough money to do some traveling and I can reschedule my return flight to fly back home earlier. But I really want to work and experience this part of living in this beautiful country as well. This is an important deal to me. And also I would like to earn some money to travel to New Zealand. Because I do not have enough money currently to do that as well. That’s the whole point behind a Working Holiday Visa, right? Working casually in order to save some money to be able to travel more.

 

Okay, this entry has become much longer and much more whining than I initially intended it to be but well, that’s how I feel at the moment. SORRY! I have randomly included some nice pictures of our East Coast Tour to make the whole story not to heavy. So in the end my next plans are not set out and this is something I am absolutely not familiar with. I am an organized, well-in-advance prepared person who needs to know what should happen next. Not having any plans or even any accommodation for the next week is a completely new experience to me. Should I look for a sharehouse or an apartment as it would be cheaper than staying in a hostel? But this will limit my flexibility to travel. I am getting a headache by thinking and trying to decide about all these possibilities, really.

 

Well, let’s see what the next day will bring. Hopefully I am not going to spend the whole day on the internet again.

Yours unplanned-and-completely-flexible Stefanie