Advertisement
Published: August 29th 2010
Edit Blog Post
Melbourne at Dusk
Central Business District and Flinders Street at dusk I remember arriving in Melbourne well. The highway from Adelaide crosses over the Westgate Bridge, which gives an excellent view over the city. Melbourne has a very spectacular skyline, which makes London look very flat, but on this particular morning it was a very grey and drab skyline which made us wonder whether we had made a serious mistake leaving the tropics. We all got off the bus extremely depressed and ran for cover from the ice-cold rain.
We met someone at the bus terminal who was looking for people to stay at his backpackers' hostel. Obviously getting a roof over our heads was the top priority, especially in this weather, so a load of us jumped into his mini-bus. The next priority was to start to look for a job so I got the tram - Melbourne is famous for its trams - back into town to sort out a Tax File Number, Medicare registration and to register with some tempting agencies. Next, I would need some clothes as I couldn't see the offices letting me work in Bali tee-shirts and shorts. I checked out the sales and managed to get a reasonable collection of formal clothes for a
little over $60 (£30). I was well pleased with myself and these would keep me going until I could get some more posted over from England.
Talking of being well pleased with myself, I have got to mention the maths test at one of the agencies in which I got 100%! (MISSING)They said that was the first time it happened, so I felt rightly smug.
Considering how easily I had bumped into Mike and Alan in Alice Springs (see
A Town Called Alice) and Adelaide (see
First Sample of Australian Culture and I Was Impressed), I had a lot of trouble tracking them down in Melbourne. By the time I found them in a hostel near the central business district a couple of days later, I had already had a job offer from one of the agencies. I was to be working in the loan accounts department of the State Bank Victoria. They had got absolutely no-where, despite their head start, so they promptly got down to the same agency and landed jobs in the same department.
It was great that we would all be working in the same department, although our jobs were different and Alan had to head back to England after a couple of months
Treasury Gardens
The Treasury Gardens and fountain at night to start a new degree course at Wolverhampton Poly. There was also another English guy, Martin, who started the same day I did and was also backpacking round the world. The Australians that we were working with were fantastic. They welcomed us in a way that I doubt the English would welcome an Australian.
I checked into their hostel as it was nearer to work, was warm and had a number of single rooms, unlike mine that was freezing and all dormitories. It was also full of people who, like us, were staying for sometime rather than just travelling through. With the hostel being so central, we were right in the heart of the Melbourne nightlife. That, and all the people we knew from the hostel and from work, a near continuous stream of free night-club passes, cheep cinema night on Thursdays and no antiquated British opening hours for the pubs combined into a great social life in Melbourne. It was a place in which I was more than happy to spend several months, despite the weather.
I am not going to bore you with a blow-by-blow account of my working life in Melbourne. I had a great
Melbourne Trams
Melbourne trams on Flinders Street time in Melbourne and it is a city that you could easily want to settle-down in, but this Blog is about travelling and that is something that I did not do much over this period. What follows in the next few pages are some of the main travel highlights of my time here before I left to travel round Australia and experience more of what it had to offer. Anything that I missed out on this time, I would get the chance to cover later when I came back here to work again (see
Ian's Back, Ian's Back!!).
Advertisement
Tot: 0.188s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 21; qc: 79; dbt: 0.1034s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb