Koalas, Kangaroos, and the End of the Ramen Noodle Era

Attention world, I’ve met both of my main goals for the week! Not only am I currently living a blissfully ghost-less (and more importantly, roommate-less) existence, but I am also employed! Or at least I will be soon. I can afford actual food now…I’m pretty pumped!

My roommate Helena moved out Monday morning. It was only 4 days, but watching her and her dim-witted friend pack up their things and leave my life forever ranked somewhere amongst the top 5 happiest moments of my life. Worst. Roommate. Ever. That terrible girl had every quality on the checklist of bad roommate qualities, except for the fact that she never went through my things. How do I know this? Everything was always exactly as I left it when I came back to the room – and trust me, had that foolish child explored any of my belongings while I was out, she would not have been bright enough to cover her tracks. Goodbye Helena - and more importantly - good riddance.

I’ve been alone since then in the room. I have my own private bathroom, my own queen size bed with 4 pillows, my own TV that gets about 5 (albeit grainy) channels, and my own private balcony. Granted, this newfound freedom is entirely day to day – someone could come tour the place at any given moment and move in – but it is winter, and the rental office said that things have been slow, so perhaps lady luck will smile down upon me, and I’ll be able to squeeze out a few more days of blessed solitude…

Last Monday was also my first actual job (as opposed to meeting with an agency) interview. It was for a telemarketing company. The job seemed awful: calling people all day long and asking them to donate even more money to causes they already donate to. The pay was pretty awful by Australian standards, and the hours weren’t great, but they accepted me. How on earth I ever managed to convince anyone that I would make a good telemarketer, I don’t know; perhaps I should be an actress? I did mull the offer over for a few hours. It seemed like sort of a gamble to turn down an offer for full time employment when one is in desperate need of said employment, but gamble I did and I told them no. The next morning I woke up and spent hours and hours on job websites applying to everything I could find that seemed decent. I lost count of the number of cover letters I wrote, but about 48 hours later I had a job! Woot woot!

So, as it turns out, I quit my finance job and moved 10,000 miles away… to take another finance job. O, the irony! What on earth am I doing, you may ask? Excellent question. Two weeks ago I may have just stared at you blankly and offered you a cookie in lieu of a real response, but my 1-year Australia plan has gone from a series of I don’t knows and I’ll figure it outs to something that is potentially approaching a vague outline of a pseudo-plan.

I’m aiming to stay in Sydney now for somewhere in the 3-4 month range. At this point, I don’t actually care about the job. I simply want to be able to make and save money, have weekends to explore the city and do the tourist stuff in the area, and take advantage of the city’s resources for planning the next stages.  The job manager at the Work & Holiday office can place people in jobs outside of the city as well, so I’d like the next working phase to be about the job, not about the specific area. Wherever something fun, hopefully one of those you-can-only-do-this-in-Australia type jobs pops up, that’s where I’ll go. Plus there are some interesting farm work exchange programs and fruit picking jobs and cattle ranch courses that you can take, so I’d like to squeeze some of that in as well. And the end? T-R-A-V-E-L. That’s where my Sydney finance job will have come in handy. Granted I won’t be staying in 5 star hotels and dining at top-notch restaurants, but running around for weeks on end won’t come cheap! So now I do have a vague outline of a plan. Needless to say this is all subject to change, but that’s what I’m plotting for the moment. City job-fun job(s)-run around.

Yes, yes, I know, I have yet to define this fancy employment of mine. I’ll be working at HSBC doing…something. Honestly, when I interviewed for position, I did actually comprehend my role when it was explained to me. I just sort of forgot immediately after I left. I’m sure I’ll figure it out again though. Basically, it's call-center work dealing with application status questions. I can’t start as soon as I’d like unfortunately, since the bank does background checks. Hopefully I’ll be able to start in about a week. The job is a 9-week role, with the potential to possibly extend for a week or two at the end, depending on how well I do and if they still need the extra help. The great thing about the role is that instead of Monday through Friday, it’ll be Thursday through Monday. Apparently banks (at least Australian ones) pay time and a half on Saturdays, and double time on Sundays! So I’m really happy about the pay, and the commute is really easy. The job is right in the heart of the “CBD” or central business district. It’s right smack in the middle of Sydney’s downtown. Perfect! That’ll leave me with Tuesdays & Wednesdays to explore and be a tourist. Plus local attractions are less likely to be crowded in the middle of the week anyway.

So although the HSBC gig is the main event here in terms of jobs, I’ve already worked my first day in Australia. I woke up Friday morning to my first actual job offer from one of the 875 temp agencies I registered with (and THANK YOU again to those who have diligently provided reference requests for me…over and over again….). The temp job was a one-day deal only. I went from phone call in bed to the reception desk at KU Children’s services in a little over an hour. It’s really sort of strange answering the phones for an establishment when you have NO idea what on earth it is that they actually….do. I had no time to google it before I left, and all I was provided with by the agency was the address, company name, and person to ask for. Apparently it’s some sort of not for profit that runs free Kindergartens and preschool programs for kids all over the eastern part of Australia. I think. Most calls just needed to be transferred to the person they asked for, but I did get a few actual questions, which I had no idea what to do with. I kept fighting the urge to ask them if they’d just like me to instead send them a pre-filled IRA distribution form, or perhaps e-mail their accountant their tax package?

Today I did some fun stuff. Look at one of my new friends!!!!

And here is another new friend. Isn’t he cute??

Cheryl (the Canadian) and I went to Featherdale Animal Park, which is a small-ish zoo about an hour from Sydney’s CBD. If you’ve ever been to the Bronx Zoo (or any zoo, really…) you’ll know that it’s not uncommon to see peacocks randomly wandering around. I’m not sure why, but zoos always seem to have random peacocks. Guess who wanders around here? Kangaroos! They hop around everywhere, and you can pet them and feed them. Kangaroos REALLY love ice cream cones. The waffle cone kind. They go crazy for them, it’s like kangaroo cat-nip. They even fight each other for them:

I also obviously saw koalas, and also wombats (which look like the love child of a pig and a house cat – very cute though) and a wacky little Tasmanian devil.  The park was great. I’m glad we went. I’ve heard larger places charge crazy extra fees to pet the koalas, and I got to do it for free – twice!

Random thoughts:

I think I applied to somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 employment agencies. I heard back from more than half of them, without me even following up. I actually stopped returning messages at one point. I have too many on my plate as it is!

I did real cooking Saturday night. It involved meat and vegetables and rice and even a little teriyaki sauce. It was quite tasty.

Australian jobs all pay either an hourly rate or a salary plus “super.” Basically, I get an additional 9% paid on top of whatever my wage is that is put into a retirement account. Real Australians can’t use it until they hit retirement age, but apparently people like me who are only pretending to be Australian for a year can claim the funds once they have left Oz and gone back to wherever they came from. So I’ll have a nice chunk of change coming to me next summer that I wasn’t planning on. Nice! I started thinking about how I would allocate the money, and then I came up with a superb idea. An EPIC idea, actually (I’m talking to one of you out there in particular – you know who you are). Three cheers for Australia superannuation funds!  So I now have an Australian checking, savings, and even a retirement account all set up at my new bank. Very cool.

My cell phone keeps time, but doesn’t actually display it anywhere, which is incredibly stupid. I wear my “Cartier” watch everywhere now. It’s become a necessity. So Seth, if you ever read this, thanks again! That turned out to be an incredibly useful gift.

People keep telling me I have an accent. I ignored some kid on the street the other day, who was trying to get me to talk to him to give money to charity, and he told me that he liked my accent. I called my bank to set up my online access, and she asked me where I was from, because I had “a strong accent.” I called up some commercial dishwasher repair place (this was for the KU Children’s Services temp job) and the repair girl asked me where I was from “in the States” since I had the accent. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able convince these Australians that it is not I who has the wacky accent, so I’ve decided to just roll with it. Yes. Fine. I have the funny accent. Whatever… J

We finally figured out how to work the heat in the townhouse, so I no longer have to go through 7 cups of tea a night to keep warm. Apparently there is a button that we were neglecting to press.

I borrowed a vacuum from the rental office and sucked up the rock salt off the floor. It was NOT easy. So far though everything has been fine ghostly spirit wise, in case anyone was really concerned about that.

I caught a cold! It was thankfully either a 24 hour thing, or else I really did just murder it with all the cold pills and vitamin C that I knocked back. I was stifling coughs all day at the temp job. I was trying so hard not to be the terrible American temp who came in and spread her germs all over the place...

I wasn’t sure all week what the British boy’s name was, the one who offered me tea when I first got here. I knew that the other British guy’s name in the house was Tom. It turns out though, that this one’s name is also Tom. So maybe he did tell me his name in the very beginning, and I just got the two British guys confused? I think the other Tom was the one who helped me get my bags up the stairs. But I’m not really 100% sure about that either. Or maybe it’s just that every boy in England is named Tom?

I’ve locked myself out of my own private bathroom twice in the last 3 days. I have an Ivy League degree, but I keep locking myself out of the bathroom. I’m sure I’m doing Cornell proud on that front.

I tried Australian Xiao Long Bao – or, as they are more commonly known – soup dumplings! They were good, but they were tiny. Then I started to wonder if our soup dumplings at home are just giant because Americans like everything big? Our cars are bigger than everyone else’s, our homes are bigger, our portion sizes are bigger, and our people are certainly bigger. Perhaps our soup dumplings are just bigger too? Just food for thought. Ha! I cracked myself up a bit on that one.

Someone called me “mate” for the first time on Friday. It was really exciting.

Plans for this week are a little up in the air. I won’t be working yet, so I’m just going to keep my fingers crossed for a day or two of temp work. I’m heading out to the famous Bondi Beach tomorrow to check that area out. I also want to start researching all the tourist things I want to tackle in NSW (New South Wales – that’s my current state of residence!). Now that I’ve got the whole job thing figured out, I can finally relax and start to have a bit of fun.

 I leave you with this thought:

When I arrived at the Qantas terminal at JFK a little over 2 weeks ago, this was the advertisement that greeted me:

Do you think that’s a bad omen?