October, 2010

Hey all,

Sorry it has been so long since my last post, I have just been so busy working! Finally sold my first big price item, a $1,100 original photograph.  Otherwise the kids have had school holidays for the past two weeks, so I spend a majority of my time with them.  We went to Luna Park, which is a carnival type place right under the Harbour Bridge in North Sydney.  It was fun, but it is definitely no 6 flags theme park.  More like a state fair or strawberry festival type place ha.  We have also gone to the beach, watched the dad play rugby (reminded me of my dad's old softball team, but the injuries were a lot worse for these old guys, no pulled hamstrings, more like a broken arm or teeth!)

I also met some other nannies in the neighborhood.  We all went out and got free champagne from some old rich guys that offered to take us sailing, hope we take them up on it!  Just having fun exploring the northern beaches on the weekdays and going into the city on the weekends.

I am starting to do the marketing for the galleries, and even this new web site/business that my boss has been planning to start for a while. Also, the mom of the kids I nanny owns her won risk/crises business consultancy firm, so she is going to have me work on some marketing projects for the company too! Pretty exciting, hopefully I will make some more connections and get a real job and sponsorship over here, since the economy is way better than the states right now!

This is Daniel Botha, 8,
at Centennial Park with the baby ducks!

Oh well that is all that is going on here in Aussieland.  Hope all is well back home, I miss everyone so much! Here are a few pictures of the kids and I at Luna Park!

This is Tiffany Botha, 7, loves listening to Justin Beiber on my iPod

Here are the girls at Luna Park, Charlotte Botha is 5.

The girls and I with Luna Park clowns.

Tuesday September 7 through Wednesday September 15

This was my first full week of work, and when I mean full, I mean full!  I went in to training at the Sydney Galleries and learned a lot on my first day.  I have to learn all the artists, their backgrounds, their styles, and last but not least how to make a sales on a piece of art worth thousands of dollars!  So I am getting some experience in sales which is relative to my degree (which I am sure my dad likes to hear!).  I also had to learn how to run the register or till as they call it, how to open up the store, how to package frames, prints, and canvases.  Lots of learning, but I went back in on Thursday and Friday and had more training.  Then on the weekend I had to open up the store and work all by myself for 5.5 hours! I only made a little but of sales, but one day I will sell painting for $4,900, it is my goal! 

On Tuesday night, I also packed up my stuff at Chris's house and was picked up by Nathalie Botha and two of the kids.  We drove into North Sydney, then their suburb of Mosman, and they took me to Thai! Yum! They are such a sweet family and I love working for them.  I finally got to unpack my suitcases, after 2 weeks, so I had some laundry and ironing to do.  Surprisingly, or not, I filled the closet and dresser full!  I think I over packed, but it has been cold and warm, so I am glad I brought so much.  Some days it is raining and freezing, and other days I am laying out in the backyard.  Of course with sun tan lotion because there is no ozone layer here.  But I am still not tan Laura, but I will be soon!  I take the kids to school, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I get to care for the youngest, Charlotte, who is 5.  We go to the park, the indoor pool, and the library.  I can't wait to explore the beautiful suburb more! I have been able to a little bit because this week the dad has been out of town, so I get to use his car! I have just driven to the middle of town to do some grocery shopping and small errands, but it is kinda scary! When I get nervous and flustered I by accident turn on the windshield wipers instead of the directionals! And when I back out I look to my right out the back window instead of to the left.  Oh and I tend to get to close to the left side of the road, which is not the middle! I have gotten the hang of it now so I will start taking the kids around next time the dad is out of town.

On the weekend I stayed with Chris and we went to this awesome Magazine launch.  There were free drinks and bags of chips (yumm dinner on a budget).  I got a little too drunk and had a rough morning at the gallery, but I pushed through it!  Then we relaxed on Saturday night so I had a good Sunday at work!

This week I have been doing the same thing, and this will probably be my rhythm for a while. Lots of traveling to and from the city.  But I have met some interesting people on the bus! (A south african minister, a cricket player that is half aussie half brazilian!) I will update when things get crazy or fun or something really unusual happens like, oh um say, Oprah coming to town! This is the first time she has filmed outside of North America! Why is she following me?

Hope you are all having an enjoyable time back in the states, I miss it,. but I don't miss not making money!  I love the cash moneyyyyy!  Love and Best Wishes!!!

Alison

Week of August 30- September 5

This week was mostly trying to find jobs, interviewing for different jobs, and spending time with Chris.  On Monday I had to leave the hostel by 9am! So I paid for a cab to take me to Chris's apartment.  His room is so small, it barely fits my suitcases.  Monday we just relaxed and hung out and I did a lot of job searching on the internet.  Tuesday morning I had an interview with a stupid marketing company, that uses "face to face promotions" aka stand on the street and annoy people.  But I went in for the interview anyway, I didn't want to shoot down any potential jobs.  But when I said I wouldn't be able to start training the next day, the lady said I should call as soon as I knew that I wanted to work with that company.  But I didn't and I am so happy I chose not to because the next day I saw the other girls that were in the interview standing outside Central Station with promotional shirts and flyers to hand out to people on the streets! What a relief I wasn't with them!

Later on Tuesday, I had an interview with a lady from an au pair company.  She was thrilled that I wanted to be a nanny because I guess I was perfect for the job.  She set up three appointments with different families on Thursday.  I went to all three families, and it was hard to make a decision.  But I fell in love with the second family I met.  They are a couple from Zimbabwe who have three children.  A boy and two girls, aged 9, 6, and 4.  They are so cute, and fit my personality perfectly.  The dad is often away on business, and the mom owns her own Crises and Risk Management Company in North Sydney, so she wants the kids to get used to her going back to work more often, which is why they want a nanny.  The live in a nice suburb North of Sydney, so I have to cross the harbor bridge or take a ferry to get back to the city, but it is not to far of a journey.  I will work the weekday mornings and nights getting the kids ready for school and picking them up and making dinner.  Nothing to difficult, so I get to work on my Martha Stewart skills!

On Wednesday we went back to the hotel/bar that played the New Orleansy band.  Then I met up with the younger girls to have a uni night out!  But I think I am too old for all of that now! Ha I felt out of place, but the I got to go back to the Landsdown! It is a bar that is right across the street from the Unilodge where we all lived two years ago.  They also took me to a new bar, called the HQ and it was filled with tons of Uni students, all sweating and dancing to bad music.  Reminded me of a much nicer Palms in New Orleans, so of course the girls love that bar!

On Friday, I had an interview with Sydney Galleries, which is a gallery/art store in Darling Harbor. I interviews with them at 10:30am, and by 1pm they called and said that they didn't want to interview anyone else because I was perfect for the job.  I will be trying to sell original art work from local artists as well as touristy prints.  I will work on the weekends and Friday nights, so I will be close to the city on the weekends, but I will be very busy.  Oh well, I am just so excited to finally make some money again after working for free all summer long!

On Saturday we walked around the city and got ready for a big night because it was one of Chris's friends birthday parties.  He bought tons of alcohol and meat and invited everyone over to his house for a bbq.  It was tons of fun, but I was very hungover again.  I think I am sensing a pattern.  I guess I can't drink like I did in college, oh well it costs less this way!  On Sunday Chris and I both had to meet up with friends at Bondi Beach.  He met up with one of his work buddies from Adelaide, and I met up with a girl from OzIntro.  She had been up to Airlie Beach and did a two day, two night sailing trip similar to what we did two years ago.  She absolutely loved it, but she was leaving Australia, back to England, the next day.  We had dinner at the best place in Bondi, Mojos!! (that is for Arin!)  I love this tapas restaurant in Bondi, and they have the best Sangria, but I was too uneasy to order it.  It was a good week of relaxing before I start working 50 hour weeks!  On Tuesday I train at the gallery, and then at night the whole family is coming to pick me up and move me into their house.  I am so excited to have my own room, my own bed, my own closet!  Plus I don't have to pay for rent or food, and I get most of the weekday days off.  It will hopefully be a good combination of suburb and city life, because I want the best of both worlds!

Saturday August 28th and Sunday August 29th

Saturday morning we had off, so my friend David and I went downtown to the Travelers at Work office to work on our resume and start applying to jobs.  The office is a great resource for backpackers to find short term work anywhere in Australia.  You can also check their online job site, which is where I found one of my jobs.  After job searching I met up with Mel, a younger girl in my sorority at Coogee Beach.  We talked for a while and I heard all about their Sydney Uni experience so far.  She is actually taking one of the same classes I took, and with the same professor! I should have brought back some of my papers for her, even though that is the class I did the worst in : (  After that I got some sushi with another friend from OzIntro, and the whole group showered and got ready for a crazy night out on the town!  We had the OzParty Bus for the night, and I had no idea what I was in for.  We had to pick a theme, so the boys picked neon, and thanks to Pi Phi and my new shirt Leanne got me in Hawaii, I had plenty of neon to wear.  The boys also bought some neon face pens, so we went all out in neon!

The bus came and picked us up right outside the hostel, and it was a rave on wheels! Techno blasting, lights flashing, and they crammed as many people as possible into the bus.  From there we went to Darling Harbor, to a bar called Wallaby, and we were greeted with fireworks shooting from a boat in the middle of the harbor.  It was perfect! I guess it was a Darling Harbor celebration or something, but we like to think they had the fireworks for us!  We went on to 4 more bars, Scary Canary, Scubar, Side Bar, and then The Gaff again.  It was a long night, and in between every bar we were dancing and sweating on the bus!  It was a very memorable night, and we took a ton of pictures, so I will share some here!

On Sunday, I woke up with little bit of a hangover, but I got myself up and moving and Chris and I went to Bondi Beach to sit and watch the waves and go to the market.  It was nice, but suddenly got very cold, so I headed back to Coogee to get ready for our final dinner with the OzIntro group.  We had dinner up in the Sydney Center Point Tower, which is the tallest building in Sydney.  The tower has four or five levels, and one of them is a a dinner buffet. The views were spectacular, especially at night.  It was fun for me to

try to point out all the different areas of Sydney.  But the height and the fact that the entire restaurant slowly rotates, so you get 360 degree views, I wasn't as hungry as I wish I was for an all you can eat buffet.  But I did try the Kangaroo! I never tried it last time, so I had to give it a go.  It tastes like dry beef.  Not the best meat I have had, but I am glad I finally can say I have tried Kangaroo!  The best part of the entire dinner was the dessert, I had amazing cheesecake and chocolate brownie.  But when we got back to the hostel, I of course had a tummy ache and had to immediately down some pepto!  That always happens to me, oh well, I had to indulge on my last night.  The dinner (not the after dinner) was the perfect way to end an amazing week.  I definitely recommend OzIntro to anyone that wants to meet amazing people, and do the most touristy things in Sydney.  I am so happy I ending up doing the program because it was one of the best weeks of my life!  But now I am getting ready for the real world, working and making more money so I can spend it on some more amazing touristy weeks around Australia.

Friday, August 27

Friday was by far the best day of the entire trip!  We woke up really early, well 7am, but that is early for backpackers, and got on a bus to see the Blue Mountains.  The Blue Mountains is an amazing area just an hour west of Sydney that is completely opposite of the city.  You would have know idea that a massive, bustling city could be so close to these amazing expanding hills and bush!  Anyways, we all walk outside the hostel wearing jeans and a sweatshirt (or jumper according to the UKers) and our tour guide says, get back upstairs, its gonna be some negative 5 shit up there.  Aka negative 5 degrees Celsius, which is in the 20s for us I guess.  So we all run upstairs and add about three more layers each!  Then we get on the bus, and our tour guide for the day, Smokey, drives us out to the Blue Mountains and tells us the history of Sydney.  Good thing I read my Sydney tourism books, I knew exactly what he was talking about and could answer all the pop questions!  After about an hour drive (we drove under the harbor bridge!) we got into the Blue Mountain area.  First we went to an area where you can camp, although I would never want to camp in these areas after hearing about all of the spiders, snakes, and mean kangaroos that hang around those parts!  Smokey made us walk straight into the bush, not on the convenient paths that the rangers had set up, to look at spiders that he found under bark.  I was officially creeped out, so I stood near the back and still managed to have ants crawl all over my legs.  But all the boys loved it, so I let them take the pictures and I will just steal them to put here for you all to see.  After the spider bush walk, we saw some kangaroos hanging around, and Smokey said that these wild kangaroos could hurt you, even though I pet a very nice joey named Ned two years ago.

We got back on the bus and headed into town for breakfast.  Then we drove into Katoomba to start our massive trek around the mountains.  We headed straightaway Suicide Point, which earned its name for a reason!  We saw this beautiful water fall, but to get there we had to hike down these giant stairs.  Little did I know when we were going down the stairs, that I would have to hike back up them!  The stairs were literally 70 degrees, I had to crawl back up them.  Needless to say, I sweat out my cold and won the award for having the most red face, and I thought I was fit!  After the three hour long suicide walk, we finally headed into town to eat lunch.  It was so cold! We sat by the fire while eating our cheese sandwiches.  Then we got back on the bus and drove to another area to hike some more!  On the new walk, we saw another waterfall that supposedly looks like a witch, but I didn't see it.  Then we saw these three rock formations, called the three sisters, and Smokey told us an old Aboriginal story of how the formations came to be.  Fortunately, after this walk down the mountains, there was a train that takes you back up to the top.  But the train goes up the mountain at almost 90 degrees! It felt like I was going to fall out of the train, since there were no seat belts, only a cage on top so you don't fall out!

After the train, we got back on the bus and went back to Coogee.  It was an amazing day.  I am so happy I finally got to see the Blue Mountains and its spectacular views!

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Thursday morning we woke up and had the morning to ourselves.  Then around midday, we drove to Bondi Beach!  There we sat near the beach, and a few of the crazy boys got in the ocean, I don't know why because it was freezing outside, and even colder in the water I am sure! I brought my swim suit, but there was no way I was getting in the water, especially because I got a cold the night before, so I was wearing a hundred layers and trying to sweat it out! Too much partying and adventures, and not enough sleep!  Then we walked the coastal walk from Bondi to Clovelly Beach.  It is the most beautiful walk in the world I think! Lots of cliffs, beautiful water, people surfing, running, and just enjoying the amazing landscape.  The walk also goes by a graveyard!  Those dead bodies have one of the best views of the ocean in Sydney! I want to be buried there! But the girls might remember that when we were there we had to walk around the cemetery because they were doing construction.  Now there is a great boardwalk that is right above the water and cliffs, with spots to sit and take pictures!  It isn't the easiest of walks, but I managed, and I think sweating helped me get over the cold (so did the tons of vitamin c pills I kept eating throughout the day!).  When we got to Clovelly Beach, one of the OzIntro Guides had set up a BBQ!  It was mostly meat, but I made a great cheese sandwich and had salad!  The walk really worked up our appetite though.  After we all went down to the beach to play volleyball.  My team lost twice, but it was tons of fun.  I also threw a rugby ball around for the first time!  I kept wanting to throw it like a football! It is weird throwing it to the side.

After volleyball, I wanted to finish the walk back to Coogee instead of getting a ride.  Why waste the beautiful views in a van? Even if I was sick! We got back and had to go to the OzIntro office where the explained how to find work, how to find places to live, and all the best places to backpack to.  I was the only one looking for work in Sydney, the rest are travelling up to Cairns and riding the bus slowly back down to Sydney or Brisbane for work.  After the talk, I went out to dinner with two of the girls, had a great fish sandwich!  Then the boys wanted to go out, but none of the girls did.  Of course, I chose to go out with the boys, and was the only girl!  We went to a nearby bar that had an awesome, and massive, outdoor courtyard.  Then inside there was two man band playing covers of John Mayer and what not. So we watched that for a bit but got bored! Ha.  We headed to another bar called the Palace in Coogee, and played some pool.  Then we all headed back to the hostel for some much needed sleep!

Wednesday, August 25th 2010

I woke up pretty hungover from the night before.  Backpacker bars are crazy, and I was out till 3 am, and I was still a little jet lagged.  But we woke up and drove down to Circular Quay.  We saw the aboriginal men playing their didgeridoos and danced for a little bit before we got on the ferry.  The ferry is one of the best ways to see the city skyline, opera house, and harbor bridge.  It was a beautiful day, probably about 14 degrees Celsius, so thanks to dad that is about 57 degrees Fahrenheit.  But the sun was shining so it seemed warmer.  We got to the zoo, and immediately went to the elephant show.  I saw two baby elephants, one of which was the first elephant to be born in Australia.  They showed off kicking a soccer ball (football), playing a harmonica, and picking up logs.  It was cute!  Then we ate lunch at the zoo, and walked around.  Saw the giraffes, kangaroos, koalas, bears, hippos and more.  But I didn't get to see the Orangutans, which I wanted to see so I could show all the UK people why Australians call red heads, or gingers, Rangas.We also saw the seal show, and one of the seals was a California seal that had a loud, deep talking voice, so they said "that is the American Accent".  They like to make fun of us Americans here.  Then we saw the bird show, which I had seen last time I was at the zoo with the girls.

After we walked down to the bottom of the hill to board the ferry back, and all of a sudden, this really nice private boat pulls up to the dock.  Tons of paparazzi showed up, so we got pretty excited and tried to guess what celebrity was going to the Taronga Zoo, and why!  We walked over to the side of the dock that no one else was on, and all of a sudden I saw Nikki Hilton!  The paparazzi almost knocked me over because I somehow had the best seat in the house.  I still have to look up why Nikki was going to the zoo (She got into a zoo van).  Maybe she was adopting an animal or sponsoring a new exhibit or something.

I got back from the zoo and was super tired, but Chris called and wanted to go see a 10 piece band.  So I met up with him for the concert and it was great.  Reminded me of being on Frenchman Street in New Orleans.  The band had a sax, trumpet, base, and played great jazzy funk music.  The bar also brewed their own beer, so I felt right at home.  Finally I got to go to bed and rest up for next day of oz experience!