Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

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I can't believe that we're now in 2010! The time is just going so fast!

Had a brilliant Christmas! Started the morning by popping a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the occasion and then opened up various presents that me and Siobhan had bought each other and the ones that mum and dad had shipped over. Sian and Dave, a couple we know from Brisbane, had driven down from Brisbane to spend Christmas with us, which was lovely. Quite an undertaking considering that it took around 23 hours of solid tag team driving for them to get here - rather them than me! We had Irish Heather (who works with Siobhan) and Sean her fiance and Canadian Jess to share our orphan Christmas (that's what the Aussies call our traveller Christmas!) We all went down to the Espy, this old hotel on the seafront for a three course Christmas dinner - had Calamari to begin, Turkey and ham for main and Sticky Toffee for desert! Mmm!

New Year was a wetter event! We'd planned to spend it in the city watching the fireworks, but the storm that blew in at around 9pm changed our plans! Torrential rain, thunder and lightning meant that midnight was celebrated in St Kilda! Needless to say, I was off my trolley long before midnight. I'd bought a brand new outfit in Cotton On to wear for the occasion and sloshed it with a whole glass of wine at about the same time as the first flash of lightning. A full outfit change later we walked out the door only for us all to end up soaked to the bone before even getting across the road!

I was tucked up in my bed by 1am as I was working at 8am at Cotton On. This is now my only job as I'm doing loads of hours before my departure from Melbourne. The silver lining was the 2.5x pay for working a public holiday - for once I was first in line to work Boxing Day, New Year's Day and all the public holidays in between!

I am actually love/hating Cotton On at the moment. It really has taken over my life. My first shifts over a month ago were really just dipping my little toe in in terms of what working in a clothes shop is actually like. We re-merchandised the shop for the sale the day before Christmas Eve and ever since it's been like swimming in Golden Syrup trying to keep the store anything like presentable! I dream of folding neat piles of tshirts, getting hangers to stay on racks, telling people which way to swipe their card and don't get me started on the fitting rooms. Noone ever seems to buy the things they try on and the neatly presented clothes end up inside out, upside down, back to front - that's if they even come out at all. In the space of five minutes one woman managed to spill a packet of sesame seeds, squash a sachet of tomato sauce and drop a toothbrush which had a head covered in what looked like her pubes (fully didn't want to get too close!) The same day some other woman complained because she found a cockroach in her changing room and everyone else was going crazy because the air conditioning was done in (with Melbourne temperatures peaking at 39°C so far this summer) Some good came out of the sale though - my favourite denim shorts were reduced from $50 to $10 (the ones I desecrated with my glass of wine on New Year's Eve!)

So, my time in Melbourne is almost up. My friend Andrew from home is coming out for six weeks from the first week in January which is really exciting! He's arriving just before I leave Melbourne, so it'll hopefully give me a good reason to transition back to travel and party mode before leaving the city. There's a lot to see in the city which I still haven't made time to see, so in the last few weeks I'm hoping to do every tourist thing I can. In recent weeks I've had a lot of 1 hour work breaks in the city and have found some amazing quaint lanes and alleys all right in the city centre. There's even a 'Dame Edna Place', right around the corner from my clothes shop, which is beautifully signposted with lights all around the name plate, but in fact is a crappy alley used for deliveries to the back doors of the restaurants in the next street!

So, I've planned the rest of my trip and am going to update the 'trips' section on here so that it's up to date with my new itinerary. Next stop - Alice Springs to do Ayer's Rock and the Red Centre. Departure from Melboure on 14th January, unbelievably we'll have been here for ten weeks so am going to be sad to leave. I will miss all my new co-workers and friends a city that has come to feel like home. It's funny, I was sitting on my normal route 96 tram today with my Coffee that I buy from the same guy most days. I have a tram pass, my ipod for the walk and a book for the ride to the city. It feels good to be settled with a job and an apartment in a city on the other side of the world, kindof like a feeling of being able to settle anywhere. Having said that, it's also an amazing feeling to pick a place and just go there and that's why we're heading to the centre of Australia next.

Well that's enough rambling on for today! Hope you had a great Christmas and New Year! Here's to 2010!

xxx

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Photos

Orphans
The Irish, The English and The Canadian.

Presents
Merry Christmas!

Pop!
Christmas morning bubbly

Christmas
Dinner. Mmm!

Sian, Dave and Siobhan
Friends from Brissy!

Heather, Sean and Me
Christmas Day drinks - cheers!