Advertisement
Here it is, our final week in Sydney and in Australia. Now we don't want you all to get offended or anything when we say this, but we don't really want to go !! Don't get us wrong, it'll be great seeing everyone again and we've missed you all heaps while we've been away but, you know how it is, it feels like we're leaving home again !!
And you don't leave home again without having a leaving do again, do you ?? Actually I'll come to that in a minute.
For some strange reason, you can only work for the one company for a total of 6 months in Australia. This meant that Lee and I would be finishing our jobs earlier than we would have chosen so I would be searching for a new one for three weeks. It had been a while, but it was back on with the shirt and tie and off to hit the streets and do a few interviews with some agencies. I'll not lie to you, the shirt and tie was like a noose round my neck and having the shoes back on was like walking in flippers on land. However,
the upshot of it all was that I managed to get a job working for Breville. That's right folks, I was working for the toastie-making kings of the world. Saviours of travellers and students over the years and possibly the one company responsible for half the worlds chees and Branston Pickle sales without even knowing it !! My job was to answer calls in the morning, taking orders from all the big shopping companies in NSW, and then in the afternoon, phoning them back to book their deliveries. As jobs go, it wasn't very exciting, but when you're in one of these jobs, you take what you can from it. Does anyone remember the old Tefal ads on TV with the guys with huge foreheads and white lab coats ?? Well Breville have a test kitchen in our building and that is what they do all day. They test all the new devices out in the kithcen and they even have a woman whose job is to produce recipies for each specific product and then answer customer queries about them. Seriously, her job title is "Home Economist" and when some old dear phones up to say that her Perfect Vanilla
Ice Cream is separating, it's this woman's job to hit the food proessor and find out why it happened. I'm not sure they have huge foreheads like the ads but in my head they did. It did give us a little more income over our final few weeks in Oz, though, so for this we were grateful.
Lee finished up at her work about 10 days before we left so we'd been out for a few drinks with her work to say goodbye on the Friday that she finished. Drinks with Lee's work are never quiet. Not once have we gone our for drinks with her work, said cheerio to everyone at 10pm and been home in bed for 11.30. It just never happened. Now they will deny this until they are blue in the face, but the only two people who were consistently present at these get-togethers were Lee and Jo. Yet they still protest that they are not the reason that First Data staff go into work with the "cold" far more times than is reasonably healthy. Still, no one really tries to stop any of this mayhem happening and we've not had one bad night out
with them so they must be doing something right. It was off to North Sydney to say farewell to Lee and as they had all managed to get a 15.30 finish and get wellied in, by the time I got there at around half six, everyone was pretty well-oiled so it was time to play catch up. I think the night finished back at ours after a good few drinks for the last time on O'Malleys in The Cross at around half four in the morning. There were a few sore heads of the morning after I do believe. The one good thing about having everyone crash at your place after a night out is that you don't have to leave the house the next day. Don the crazy Irishman had left to go to work at about half seven but poor Chloe, his girlfriend, had to traipse an hour and a half home to French's Forest in the North of the city to curl up in a ball before she could feel better.
The idea after this was that I would work up until we left and Lee would take the 10 days she had left in Oz
and sort out all the stuff that we had to do before we had to leave. You could tell, though, that after her first day of trying to sort out the bomb-site that was our flat, she was not going to enjoy this at all. To be honest, I had the easy job out of it all. Go to work, come home and then get paid at the end of the week. Lee was sorting out clothes, sortingout visa's, sorting out tax claims, sorting out superannuation details for us and it was a complete mess. We'd done pretty well to keep most of the info that we needed while we were away but the rest of the stuff had been lost over time so it was a thankless task.
The leaving do for Lee and I had been planned up in French's Forest at Don and Chloe's. They had kindly invited us and some friends up for the weekend to their home near Manly and we could party on there and say goodbye to everyone. Our pal Tracey had also come up from Melbourne on the Thursday and was going to spend the weekend with us as well so
we could say cheerio to as many people as we could before we left.
So Tracey and Lee spent a couple of days, pottering about in Sydney and doing what girls do best, namely shopping and drinking. They took themselves down to the harbour and had a couple of drinks and then decided to head out to Watsons Bay for the rest of the day as it's really nice out there. Lee, being the prepared one as always, remembered to pick up the time table for the ferry back to the city but the thing is, once you pick up the timetable, you should always then look at it, and not assume that because you have a timetable in your posession, that it will automatically transfer the times to your head. The result of this was that Tracey and Lee were sitting with a 6 pack and a bag of fish and chips on the beachfront at WAtson's Bay as the last ferry was waving them goodbye. A quick taxi dash to the next ferry terminal saved the day though. I can only imagine that this stressed them out because they only made it as far as the bar
across the road from the ferry before deciding that htey needed another drink. Cue the phone call to me at my work to let me know where they were and to let me know to bring cash with me.
Don and Chloe, who we'd met through Lee's work, had kindly invited us up to their house at French's Forrest for final weekend in Oz and our leaving do. The idea being to have everyone round for a barbecue and a few drinks. This was pretty much what happened as well. Don and Chloe had a wicked house that was perfect for having a perty in and it also had a table tennis table in the front room, however, the ping pong tournie that had been planned deteriorated into people smacking it back and forth for two minutes and then getting bored and giving someone else a go. It was great though, to say goodbye to everyone and have all our pals around us (apart from Rosie and Phil) just before we left.
And that is that folks !! Our Australian adventure is now over and we are moving on to pastures new as we head home. Australia has
been amazing for us and there were more than a few tears shed as Lee and I headed through passport control at the end. It just felt really weird not to be returning to Oz when we left and I don't think it really hit us until we got to the airport. I can't see us not returning here in te future, we've absolutely loved it and the best thing we can say is that it only feels like a few weeks that we've been here.
Our next stops are Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa and France.
Farewell Australia (but not forever).
Graham and Lee
Advertisement
Tot: 0.11s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 7; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0765s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.2mb