Our Australia experience is not going as I had expected. I didn’t have any extraordinary and fluffy dreams about it, but I thought things would be different. Ha, like life ever turns out exactly the way you plan it! This is how I had planned it to happen:
1. We would arrive in the Australia and would be completely overwhelmed by the fact that we had literally moved to the other side of the world. It would feel like a freaking massive thing and we would be ecstatic. Instead, arriving in Gold coast felt pretty normal since it turned out that Australia is not very different from what we’re used to. It wasn’t even very hard to get there. That’s when I realized that going to the other side of the world is actually not very difficult, since all we had to do was just to board two planes. My emotions was a mix-up a weirdly normalcy and still feeling like we’re just there on holiday.
2. We would quickly find paid farm jobs. We always wanted to do the farm job first to get it out of the way, so we started sending out applications. My only expectations were that it was going to be paid work. Other than that, I thought that the next 3 months were basically going to be a hell. We would work long hours, live have a really poor living standard and the work would be very hard and repetitive. It was just something that we had to do in order to get our second visa. Our 88 days were going to be like a black hole on our Australia experience that we couldn’t wait to get done. It obviously didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, we arrived in winter when the most farming is at a low peak and struggled to find decently paid work (no, 80-100 for 12 hours hard work is not a fair wage).
Life had other plans and we started volunteering at a macadamia farm in the outback. We worked short hours (4h/day) for food and accommodation, saw a part of Australia that many Australians haven’t even seen and got a deeper understanding of our new country. It didn’t give us any savings, but we got a far better experience than we had expected. Our farm experience is actually one of the most memorable parts of our Australia adventure.
3. We would leave straight from the farm to Brisbane or one of the other cities to find work. We would work, save as much money as possible and eventually travel around Australia. We wouldn’t do any international travelling for the next year or so and this is something that I was a little sad over. There’s plenty to see and do in Australia, but I love exploring a foreign country. Luckily, life never goes as planned and we made the decision to travel around Bali for a whole month! We went to Kuta (didn’t like it), fell in love with Ubud and its hippie feeling, lazed around in Gili T and explored Uluwatu. Bali had never really been on my travel list, but I’m very glad to have seen it.
4. We would go back to our original plan after Bali: Work, save money and travel. We both thought that we would jobs within a month or so. Well, it didn’t happen. We’re both starting to feel a little too old to be working at a random place with a bunch of eighteen year olds. Nothing wrong with that, but we both feel like we are finished with that part of our lives. We’re more interested in building a career, but are still struggling with finding proper jobs. I did some casual work for awhile, but I’m currently back to being a job seeker. We’re getting closer and closer to the point where we need to make a decision- Carry on in Australia or come back to Europe. We’re both feeling pretty lost at the moment and takes every day as it comes.
The only thing that I’m frustrated over is the job situation, but I’m happy that everything else worked out the way it did. It might not have been according to plan, but it has all worked out fine. Everything will eventually work out, so it’s no idea to try to plan it as much.