Well i guess i should have done this a long time ago, but i hadnt been doing much, so i wouldnt have had anything to write about! Ok.. i'll briefly go over what ive been upto over the first few weeks.
I arrived at 5.30am and it wasss raining! Good start. Paige picked me up and took me on a lovely (accidental) tour around melbourne. Didnt really get upto much, Paige was in uni quite abit so i just hung around the flat most of the day, then lots of drinking at night! We did a few trips down to Geelong and stayed in paiges parents house which was nice, also watched the australian football grand final (Geelong VS St Kilda) in Geelong, and they won, so the night out was pretty crazy! Morgan, Paiges sister, took us for a drive down the great ocean road, pretty amazing views around there. Pictures from all that are on facebook, cant attach any to this because im not on my laptop! Anyway, October 3rd i flew from Melbourne to Perth and met Jayyyy!
Sooo Perth! Again i didnt really get upto much for the first week or so, Jay was busy working so i just hung around the hostel and met lots of lovlely people! Theres a hell of a lot of Irish people over here, somebody should go check if anyones still left in Ireland 'cause there cant be many! Lots of drinking in the hostel! Most nights you can usually guarantee somebody will be outside drinking, and its very hard to get past without being dragged into drinking games! Jay took me for a tour around King Park which is a biggg national park thats up on the cliffs and looks over Perth. Not sure if i managed to get those pictures up yet but ive got loads that ill do when i get back to the hostel!
Ok, so i got a job working as a labourer on a renovation of 36 apartments, and Jeremy, a french guy from the hostel got the same. Was a pretty rough job, started easy just sweeping out all the apartments, but then we had to lift all the paving slabs from the front garden, and werent given any gloves so my hands got pretty battered pretty quick! Then we went onto cleaning the walls so the painters could come in and respray.. so easy.. but boring! Jeremy then left to go back to frenchie land, and i was stuck stripping the plaster off bathroom ceilings with a scraper, which resulted in my knucles being scraped off by the ceiling! That only lasted 4 days, the company didnt need anymore work doing until the professionals had done their work, so should be some more coming up soon, although i cant imagine how slow aussie builders must be! Errrrm.. we alsoooo went to Joondalup to meet someone jays mum knew.. kind of.. anyway he was the old Everton captain, but now manages.. or coaches.. the Perth soccer team? i think.. i duno! all i know is he used to play for everton! Met him at a chinese restaurant along with about 4 of his scouse mates and they all bought us dinner! Went for dinner with some of jays mates he met while travelling.. a load of Irish doctors.. very odd! but they had a bbq, my first in australia and it was cooked by the Irish!!
Nowwwwww! that was the first.. month nearly! But then an add came in the hostel for 2 Haystackers.. so i rang up, and rang a german lad called Till who had been staying in the hostel, and we were picked up at 8am the next day by a lady called Julie. We were taken to a farm about 1 and half hours east of perth, met her husband Stephen, and started work around 1pm. Now basically, the tractor chuggs along pulling a sled, and we walk along stacking the hay bails on top of it, until theres 3 layers of 4 bails, and we slide them off by stabbing a big metal pole into the floor! Sounds eeeeeeasy! But the hay bails weigh 20kg, the temperature has ranged from 25-32'C and you have to wear jeans, long sleeve shirt, 2 pairs of gloves, boots and a hat, or the hay will tear you to pieces and the sun will fry you. So at times i thought i was actually going to die, but you cant stop or you'l miss a hay bail and then you have to run back for it and try and catch the sled back up! We did that for the end of the first day, and then all day the second and third and in that time we stacked over 2500 bails of hay. By now my hands were covered in blisters and ached a lotttt, but me and Till would go for a swim at lunch and after work and have a few beers, so it was worth it!
Storms were predicted for monday, (its Saturday at this point) so all effort went on moving the stacks of hay into the barn to protect from the rain, which involved people driving trucks with trailers down to the fields, the big fork lift loading them on, driving back up to the barn and the forklift loading them into bigger stacks, but luckily (it was 32'C outside) me and Till just stayed in the barn and basically just secured the stacks down so the forklift could pull out without bringing it all down with it. Sunday was the same thing, but we got to drive! Most of you will know that i cant drive, and havnt really driven in the past, but i picked it up pretty fast and drive all the time now. Ooo and, as one of the stacks came in high on the forklift, there was a spider hanging down from it which landed on another stack, and i saw the horrible red stripe of a redback spider, for anyone that doesnt know, theyre from the same family as black widows and are pretty lethal! So i pointed it out to Till and he managed to squash it with the securing pole, problem solved! Monday, the storm hit at about 8am so we'd only managed to do one run of stacks into barn before we had to stop. Once the hays wet it cant be moved, cause if its put on a wet surface the bottom will just rot instead of drying so it has to stay in the field until its dry, which could take days and theres still threats of more rain. So the farmer said we could go back to perth if we wanted, and come back when its dry, but i decided to stick around and help the farmer build walk in fridges, which is his little side business, where as Till went back to Perth, and has now found a full time job so wont be coming back!
Ahh also, during the storm we got a call on the two way radio from the farmers brothers wife, saying she'd crashed into a tree in her yute, so we went down there, Julie took her home while me, stephen and his brother pulled the yute from the trees. It wasnt too badly damaged, easily drivable ( and she was fine), so stephen took his brothers yute, his brother took the crashed one and i took stephens, which i was used to, but it meant i was driving on the roads even though id only started driving 2 days before, AND it was in the middle of a storm! butttt i was pretty confident, i just followed the other 2 down a few roads until we got to stephens brothers house, no problem! ( by the way, a yute is used by most out here, its their name for a flatbed truck, but its actually a 4.2 litre Toyota LandCruiser )
So tuesday! that was today! It was too wet to do anything with the hay so i spent the day helping the the fridges again, but at about 5pm i went round and rolled all the single hay bails over to let them dry which was took awhile and the heat was pretty killer!
Well thats about all, missed a few things but i need to go sleep! Hopefully ill be able to keep this updated now! PEACE!
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