To start the week I didn’t have a job. Bearing in mind that I am within the first ten people on the priority list and all the new people are working, I had a moan to the owner of this hostel, and luckily I am very good at having an answer to absolutely everything. I landed myself a job, two days a week. To be honest, I’d rather repeat the day where I thought I might cry because I planted so much five times over than be stuck in the hostel for five days, but at least it’s something.
Monday, I worked at a farm that I was on last week and weeded for six hours. At first I thought that it’d be easier to crawl to ease the back and knee ache, though I ended up giving myself a dead leg after three hours of crawling and couldn’t feel my foot properly for the rest of the work day.
Wednesday was my first shift on another watermelon farm. It was quite amusing to hear people talking tactics in the van about how fast to go and a couple of others and me went at least twice as fast as the ten others without too much effort. Planting can actually get quite tactical and competitive; my tactic is to get a good playlist on and to go near the other quick people and keep up – with that said, I usually finish a row in at least third place anyway. There are days where you know that you’re just going to be working for a couple of hours so a lot of people will go slower as more time spent on the farm = more money. Having worked with quite a few half jobs in the hospitality industry, I’ll end up just annoying myself if I’m too slow.
Thursday, I was off again and was back to work on Friday. The people I was working with seemed to only be able to talk about goon, how drunk they were, how they were still drunk or about how they were going to get drunk after work. I was bored of it after two minutes of being in the van, and it carried on for the whole of the shift.
It got to the point on Friday where it was so hot (surprise!) that the farmer drove me to another part of the field and we just sat having a chat in the ute for five minutes with the air con on full blast. It was one of the days where sweat just drips off your face onto the plastic sheets that we plant onto. He asked me what I’ve done with myself before the farm work so I said about working in France, living in London and travelling pretty much the whole of last year, and he thought that I was a lot older than the people that I work with. I’m actually one of the young ones.
Friday was St Patricks Day. I wasn’t in the mood to go out so I hired a few movies and had watched a couple. Saturday night I actually didn’t go out and opted for a movie marathon, but only managed one and a half. Today, I’m two and a half movies in, about to watch the third and perhaps a fourth which I probably won’t manage.
I can’t remember if I mentioned it in another post but Sunday is the day to get a Domino’s for $5, nearing the $10 mark if you want a cheese stuffed crust (obviously I do), as the supermarkets are shut. Just an excuse to have pizza. It’s going to get to the point when I would’ve had pizza every Sunday for around 20 weeks in a row, and that might be one of my personal favourite achievements of my past 22 years. Today, I had one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had; not as good as the one I had when I accidentally booked a flight to Milan instead of Venice last year but definitely in the top ten.