Roo Around The World

I’ve been living in Sydney for a little over 2 months and to be honest it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. I can’t quite believe it’s almost December already! We came here fresh from camp, full of excitement for another summer and a year of new friends, new jobs and new experiences.

And that’s exactly what we’ve had so far. We arrived on a Thursday, stayed with a friend for two nights before moving into our own apartment in the awesome Surry Hills. We’d booked the apartment for 2 weeks through Airbnb and it was great to have our own space (link to apartments vs hostels post) in the city as we settled in. We’d already set up jobs for all three of us at another kids camp in North Sydney called Camp Blue, but this time it was just for two weeks over their school holidays. A perfect way to jump straight in to our new lives in Australia.

Camp started the Monday after we arrived in Sydney and so we spent an incredible couple of weeks teaching our own classes (I was teaching a media class called Newsroom, Rosa was doing Drama and Tash taught Cooking) as well as helping out in various other classes around camp, such as Zumba, Circus, Chess and Art. The kids were amazing (most of the time) and we made great friends with our colleagues, the majority of whom had all worked at summer camp in the USA at some point, so we all had a lot in common and each brought our own experiences from our camps the states to Camp Blue, making it a very special and enjoyable place to work. If I could work there all year round I absolutely would (*hint hint*), but Camp Blue only runs during the Australian school holidays for two weeks at a time.

Because Camp Blue is a daytime camp, that meant we were done and free to go at about 5:15pm everyday (6pm at the latest) – this was something we found pretty surreal, as at camp in America you are working 24 hours a day, 6 days a week, so having the evenings off was a real treat. You can imagine our delight when we realised that the whole weekend in the middle of the two weeks was our own to do with what we wanted!

We spent that weekend wandering around the city, having out with friends and generally enjoying the sunshine. Oh and looking for an apartment to live in. We had one week left in our studio apartment and needed to find somewhere to live asap. That was pretty stressful, and we spent hours scouring rental sites and gumtree, looking for somewhere big enough for the 3 of us, that was within our budget and available for a short term lease. It wasn’t easy. We called many, many, MANY people to arrange viewings, only to often be told that the place had already gone. It was massively frustrating. But eventually, after a lot of stress and rushing around trying to get the bond together,  we sorted a little place in Darlinghurst, just down the road from Kings Cross station, with two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen and living room, and well within our price range. We moved into our apartment (sorry, ‘unit’) on the Sunday after Camp Blue ended (we needed the Saturday to get over our hangovers from the epic end of camp drinks the night before!) and have been loving living here ever since. While it’s not a palace, it’s perfect for what we need, and it’s great to have our own space and somewhere to call home while we’re here.

In the 7 (and a bit) weeks since the big move, we’ve all been pretty busy. Okay, well Rosa and Tash have been pretty busy while I’ve been, um, enjoying my freedom. Tash quickly found a new job working at the Rekorderlig Bar at the Night Noodle Markets in Hyde park, an awesome food festival that went on for 3 weeks as part of Good Food Month, and once that was over she soon found another job as a waitress at Glebe Point Diner. Rosa wasn’t far behind on the job front, and came back from an interview one day announcing that she’d been hired and preceded to start work the following Monday at big chain cafe Jamaica Blue. Excellent. I, on the other hand, suddenly found that I was pretty much unemployable for any customer service/retail/backpacker suitable job, as I’ve never actually had such a job before. I’ve worked in a lot of places and done lots of different types of work, but never actually had a ‘job’ job – I’ve only ever done things that I thoroughly enjoyed or were one-offs or cash-in-hand type things, which apparently isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to find a job, any job, that will pay the rent and give you some spending money. Actually, that’s not true. I did get offered a job as a photographer/sales person at Madame Tussaud’s, but the hours and pay were so bad it just wasn’t worth it. And then I got a job as a door-to-door sales person but I just couldn’t quite bring myself to take it. I really didn’t want to be one of those annoying people you pen your door to who just try to sell you stuff you don’t want. Maybe I’m too picky though.

Anyway, so while Rosa and Tash went off to work everyday, I found myself alone in the city quite a lot. I went around handing out CVs, spent a lot of time online applying for jobs, took my Penny board out for a skate, enjoyed the sunshine at the beach or the Botanical Gardens, saw some friends, did some freelance video editing work, watched A LOT of tv, and actually just quite enjoyed living the unemployed life. Sydney’s a pretty sweet city to live in. Yes I got bored sometimes, but I tried to focus my time on something productive so holed up in the library (yay, free wifi – we don’t have it in our apartment) and made a lot of changes to this blog. If I didn’t have a really job then I decided that this was going to be my job. I made the move to self-hosted so my site is finally my own, I wrote a lot of posts, connected with heaps of other travel bloggers, made myself a schedule, pitched a bunch of articles to other sites, updated a heap of stuff, gained some affiliate marketing and so on. Phew, this blogging thing is like a full time job!

It’s now under a month until Christmas and I’ve just picked up some work looking after an 11-month old baby which is fantastic (for my soul as well as my bank balance), and then on the 22nd of December I’m jetting of to Mauritius to spend Christmas with my family. And I cannot wait. It’ll have been 7 months since I’ve seen them and it’s gonna be awesome. Then it’s back to Sydney for New Year’s Eve and whatever 2014 has to offer. Bring it on!

 

*Note: I realise I may have repeated myself a bit from my last life update post (From London To Australia), but hey ho…sometimes it’s hard to remember what you wrote over a month ago!