After my trip up the coast from Sydney to Brisbane, I had planned to stick around Brisbane and work for a month or so in order to fund my flight home via South East Asia. It was a bit of an odd sensation stepping off of the bus in Brisbane. A few other backpackers jumped off the bus and looked around with wide clueless eyes at the tall buildings of Australia’s third city. These were the same clueless eyes that were on my face nearly six months prior. It’s been awhile since I arrived in a familiar place, so being in Brisbane felt somewhat like going home. Once I was in Brisbane I met up with some old friends and walked down the same streets that I walked several months before. A couple familiar tagged walls reminded me of three Canadians I shared these streets with. To be honest, being back in Brisbane brought on a very somber feeling; I think it was because being back really symbolized the end of my Oz experience (Or so I thought, but we’ll get back to that in a sec). My goal for Brisbane was to find work straight away and begin saving for my flight home and one last trip to South East Asia to put the cherry on top of my adventure sundae.
After six days cleaning Caz’s fridge and seven nights keeping my spot on the floor warm, my stomach was full of incredible vegetarian nutrients and my back was sore, but I was still unemployed. I was beginning to stress because at a glance things weren’t looking too good for my cherry sundae. Yes, it was crunch time if I was seriously going to get myself to Asia. With impeccable timing I received a message from a Finnish angel, Johanna who I’d met in Melbourne, reunited with again in Sydney and once more at the ticket counter in Brisbane transit station. She was passing through Brissy on her way to work in Newcastle. We planned to meet for lunch, but before I knew it I was sitting with her on a fifteen-hour night bus ride to Newcastle for a rug/ Manchester/ bra & panties expo, which employed backpackers for a few weeks for set up and runnung of the show. (This was the unexpected Aussie experience that I alluded to earlier). The funny thing about this is that if you know your Australian geography, you’d know that Brisbane and Newcastle aren’t close (hence, the fifteen hour bus ride) but you’d also know that it is very close to Sydney: The city I had only left a couple weeks sooner and the place that I was quite happy not returning to on this trip.
But, as soon as I found the work I called up Fraser and Mel (friends from home, New Zealand and other random places) who were looking for work in Sydney. They were in Newcastle before Johanna and I had our first bathroom break. The night bus ride was long but after hearing all about Cyclones and snakebites, and an extremely uncomfortable hour sleep I was caught up with Johanna and her travels just in time to arrive in Newcastle three hours before we were scheduled to start work. There was a quick reunion with Joe (Finland) and Jon (Norway), who’d I’d also met in Melbourne and Sydney. But once we started work we didn’t stop until seven very long days later. The work was decent (we were just carrying rugs around) and the hours varied between 10 and 13-hour days. When the show opened to the public Fraser and I were door security (probably because we’re both really intimating guys). We had opposite doors, but the best part was that they gave us in-ear radio sets (you know, the kind that the body guards of the US President wear). We changed channels so no one else could hear us (so we thought) and just kept ourselves entertained by daring each other to talk with different accents/ sexuality/ vocabulary to approaching customers. For instance, the “Meow” game was a big hit. This is the game that is from Super Troopers where the point is to say “Meow” like a cat in place of the word “now”. The most I got was four ‘meows’ to one customer as they were leaving the store, it was pretty good considering you only have five seconds of their time, and hey it was worth a beer as well. Fraser’s gay voice was always worth a laugh too, but I found out that my Southern accent is really quite rubbish.
One of our actual duties was to check the receipts of the customers and make sure that it corresponded with the items in their bag. Since there was a massive bra and panties section we had to ask to see some of the ladies “knickers”. I definitely thought it would be a better story when the day came that I got paid for girls to show me their underwear all day; but sadly, it isn’t.
Hours turned into days, and those days turned into a week when Fraser and Mel left Newcastle and I moved into the “working room”. This was the room that had eight of us all working together at the expo, so it was quite the experience to be spending almost every waking and non-waking minutes with seven other travelers. To be honest it was a blast! There wasn’t a single hour that would go by without a really good laugh; it was kind of like a slightly more grown-up slumber party that lasted a couple weeks. A couple mourning surfs and a few ‘slap the goon’ sessions between ‘sitting on the beach in castle’ nights made the time fly by here. Audun, Mari, Jon, Johanna, Merretta, Joe, Dorthea and all the other workers at the Rug Expo, thanks guys for making Newcastle as fun as it gets and for closing out my Australia with really unexpected but great style.
Right ‘meow’, I have a flight to Malaysia where I plan to travel up through Thailand, and anywhere else I end up before heading home. I should be back just in time to get there, which is what I consider to be impeccable timing. So until next time, take care ‘meow’ you hear?
Happy Trails,
Ryan
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