Sydney Life

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Ho ho ho!

We're still here! I thought I'd give the blog a break whilst we were working but there's been plenty going on so here's the update...

It's Tuesday 14th December, it's a bright sunny morning and I'm waiting to go to work. For the past 2 months. Clio and I have been working in a call centre in the hipster capital of Sydney, Newton. Work starts at 2pm and we knock off at 8pm, 6 days a week. We try to make the most of our mornings...mainly by sitting around, watching TV and occasionaly going for a swim (or a sunbathe).

The company we work for is Coles (a supermarket giant in Australia). Coles own a chain of bottle shops (off licences) called Vintage Cellars and we phone people up on their behalf and chat to them about wines, with the end result being (hopefully) that the person will buy a case of wine.

We've had the phone slammed down on us, been told to 'f$%# off' once or twice and hear the line (in a broad nasal ozzie twang)
'naaaaaah, oim pretty roight for wine at this stage mate!!'
about a million times a day. However we've actually got pretty good and eventually got promoted to work on the 'orders team' which means we chat to existing customers which is much easier and we're averaging over 10 cases a day.

Every Friday we have wine tasting (with a 'spt only' policy - using a 'spitoon'!) where we've been subjected to some of the snobbiest wine snobbery I've ever heard. To be fair though, the company have been great and genueinly work hard at training you on your knowledge and I've absorbed huge amounts in a short amount of time.

I now know that a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Coonewara region in South Australis has a distinctive flavour of casis as it is a hot climate grape, and also has aromas of eucolyptus on the nose...so there!

The best bit about working in Newtown is that we've met some cool people in the call centre and all our colleages have a variety of cool job on the side. Jeremy and Paul are in a band called The Snowdroppers who have recently been signed, Ish is a professional Pakour (free runner) expert , Dave (a fellow backpacking Pom) is an actor and there's a variety of artists, photographers and DJ's.

Apart from living and working in the call centre for 2 months, we've managed to get out a little bit and had some fun nights out. We went to see The Snowdroppers at Sydney Uni, checked out a performance of 'Midsummers Nights Dream' in Centenniel Park and recently saw Biffy Clyro at a theatre in Merrickville

To be honest, we're really enjoying life in Sydney and it'll be really sad to leave in January. We finish for Xmas at the end of the week and looking forward to a trip to the Hunter Valley next week (for some wine tasting) before we experience our first summer Christmas Day.

Hope the snow has eased off in England and you're all looking forward to some time off. We'll be thinking about you all!

Merry Christmas!

Ali and Clio x

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