Brisbane

These are The Wonders of Down Under. This is the story of my trip to Australia.

When I originally arrived in Australia, I had planned on traveling for a bit, then finding a permanent job and permanent residence. After visiting Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Cairns, I figured Brisbane would be a good place to stay for a while. As I left the Cairns airport, I scrambled to find a decent hostel to stay at for the next night or two. It turned out that I was choosing the place I would live for over four months.

An original staved water pipe

After arriving in Brisbane, I visited some of the free exhibits around the city. The Gallery of Modern Art and the Queensland Art Gallery both turned out to be within walking distance of the hostel that I am staying at. The exhibits were all from artists in Australia, Asia, and the Pacific. The gallery included a large portion of aboriginal art, which provided a lot of insight into aboriginal life and culture. I was also able to visit the Museum of Brisbane, where they talked about the original settlements as a penal colony and some of the infrastructure used.




















I was looking to find a permanent job, but in the meantime I decided to take advantage of the "job club" at the hostel. Basically, it is just a way of connecting backpackers and employers in the local area. Most of the jobs only last for one day, and are paid under the table. They were mostly dirty work, but for temporary work they were great.

Backfilling and compacting behind the retaining wall

Here was one of the first jobs I did. I worked for a contractor who was putting in a retaining wall to level out a backyard. I had only came in on the tail end of the job, but we wheel-barrowed topsoil from the driveway to the new yard, and then ran a compactor over the soil. Definitely got a new appreciation for how difficult it is to get the correct soil compaction....

A couple more pics:

Furniture delivery service

Building a deck

Putting up sheet rock (called gyprock in Oz)

I was also able to visit the XXXX Gold brewery here in Brisy. Brewery tours are always fun, learning about their manufacturing technology is funner, but drinking their product at the end was funnest! This is one of their old school bottling machines.


Mt Coot Tha is one of the best lookout points in all of Brisbane. Luckily one of my friends had access to a car, and we made a trip up to watch the sunrise. Definitely an awesome view!

On the days where I was not able to get any work, I needed a hobby to fill the time. There is a local skatepark and basketball court about 10 minutes walk from the hostel. I decided to buy a board, and pick up some of my old tricks. There was also several people at the hostel that were interested in playing basketball, and we were able to get some solid games together. Really wish we had a net though...

Spaghetti structure competition results (and free sandwiches)

Sydney from the air

Eventually my search for work started to show some results. After a pretty intense online screening process involving video interviews and an online aptitude test, I was given the opportunity to interview for a job in Sydney. The company was cool enough to pay for the flight from Brisbane and a rental car in order to get me to the interview. Getting there was still a bit rough though, as it was my first time driving in Australia and the flight had been slightly delayed. The combination of driving on the left side, Sydney traffic, having no clue where I was going and being late/hungry was a bit frustrating, but I was still pretty psyched to be there. Once I arrived, I found out I was one of six people whom they invited, and we basically did a large group interview where we did several team activities and had some fun together as well as received some free sandwiches (thank god). This picture shows one of the activities where we split into two teams and tried to design/build a structure out of string, tape and spaghetti in order to support a marshmallow as high as possible within 15 minutes. Initially my team lost, but then the other team's structure fell over, handing the win to us. In the end I was not offered the position, but like, free sandwiches right? It was also a good morale booster when they mentioned that out of 380 applicants, we were the only six worthy of their delicious sandwiches.

Some pics with friends from the first half of the stay:

 

This concludes the first half of my stay in Brisbane so far - I plan on writing more at a later time. That's all folks!