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So hello again from Cottesloe! But this time it's hello from the warmth of my bed whilst it's torrentially raining and blowing outside...so much for the 30+ degrees it's been for the past few weeks... The upside to this weather though is that I am actually forced to write my blog. I've already passed 6 hours of this stormy day reading and doing sudokus, so I really can't put this off any longer. I've also left myself a lot of ground to cover. I can't believe the last entry I did was just after my birthday - that's more than 7 weeks ago. So what have I been doing and where am I up to at the moment? Well, firstly, I'm still in Cottesloe - still living in Ocean Beach Backpackers (albeit now living in an all-female dorm = actually getting sleep) - and still working as a waitress next door. And that's key: most of my time is spent working, getting ready for work, or being knackered after work. Sophia (my ex-Director of Studies at Newnham) warned me that waitressing is hard work, and oh man am I learning that for myself. I'm currently working around 40 hours a week; though the majority of those hours are worked between Friday-Sunday, and the rest made up of evenings during the week. The restaurant that I work in is picturesque: it has huge windows for walls that look out over the beach, so each evening we get to work whilst watching the beautiful sunset. I do enjoy it there, but I also do feel like my life for the past 7 weeks or so has been work work work...the 'holiday' part of this visa is most definitely yet to come!! Which leads me nicely into talking about my new plans. (Though I say this tentatively as one thing I've learnt from being here is that plans change all the time...). So originally I thought I would probably stay in Perth until around Christmas time and then head onto Melbourne for January/February. However, something happened that changed that idea...something known as Gav... For those of you who keep up with my Facebook, you'll have seen that I've met somebody over here - not that that was my intention at all (so much for my year of being single and completely independent!). But he's amazing - he's from Dublin and we were friends right from when I arrived at this hostel. We've pretty much been together for a couple of months now...though 3 weeks ago he left to go home for Christmas and I miss him crazily. But he arrives back here on December 29th...just in time for New Year :). We then plan to stay here working until March(ish) to get together enough cash that we can buy a campervan (which he's going to spray paint pink for me!!) and spend the next few months travelling all around Oz. The plan is to toss a coin to decide whether to head North or South first...and then just get driving! We have loads of friends from the hostel who have either already started a similar journey or who plan to, so we'll be hoping to meet up with them as we go around. Most notably we're super excited about meeting up with two English lads who lived in my old dorm with me for a few weeks back in October...Kirk and Dan. The only way to describe Kirk and Dan is as utter legends. They were so much fun to live with and their Australian adventure is filled with so many hilarious stories: in the few weeks they lived here they managed to crash their car, get kicked out of the hostel, fall down the stairs to the beach wrapped in a swag (sort of bed/sleeping bag), shave their heads and end up looking like convicts, before finally driving off on their trip in matching cowboy hats whilst listening to the Grease soudtrack. My writing really cannot do justice to how funny they were...how likely they are to actually die in Australia...or how much we're looking forward to meeting up with them somewhere on the East Coast next year. I also said at the end of my last entry that I would start introducing you to some of the main players in my hostel life. Well you've already heard about Gav. And along with him, there were two other guys - Scott from scotland and Craig from Corby - who were my main buddies here for a long time. We all lived in dorm 22 (well, Scot, Craig and I did - Gav sort of moved himself in!) and they were the first people I really met when I got here. I adopted Craig as my hostel brother (for a while we actually had people going that we were real siblings), and on my first night here it was Scott that introduced me to everyone in the hostel courtyard so that I instantly could settle in. It was an amazing couple of months hanging out and living with them, but in the past few weeks it's been a massive change: Scott was kicked out on the same night as Kirk, and Gav and Craig both left to go home for Christmas within a week of each other. This kind of change was really difficult to deal with in the beginning; I know I'm supposed to be travelling, but really I'm just living and working in a new place, so attachments are made easily. And because you live with these people all the time, relationships grow very quickly. So for them all to leave was a massive shock to my system. But Gav and Craig are both coming back at the end of December, and Scott is still around (living in his car!), so it's just about adapting to the change and enjoying a few weeks of being on my own. But it's not even like I'm on my own. There's so many other people in the hostel that there are always people to socialise with - over the past few weeks everybody's even been joking about how I'm never around any more because I'm always working! An amazing example of how social the hostel is was Gav's leaving do: it was a Saturday night and we all arranged to go for a night out in Perth City. It turned out that around 30 people came out and it was awesome - everywhere you looked in the club you could recognise faces, and it was just such a nice feeling to have such a community of people out together. That's also been a really important thing for loads of us coming up to Christmas - the fact that we will all be together even though we're all alone and away from home. Some of the girls have been amazing and organised a secret santa for the whole hostel, as well as getting everyone to chip in so that they can buy loads of food to put on a big Christmas day spread. And this is on top of the free Christmas lunch that the lovely hostel staff are putting on for all of us at lunchtime on Christmas day. The girls also went and bought a load of Christmas decorations the other day and have made the courtyard all Christmassy and beautiful - I'll get some pics up soon! Even so, it's so strange to think that it's nearly Christmas. Yesterday is was 37 degrees here, and it's only going to get hotter. So Christmas day in shorts and t-shirt with drinks on the beach it is! Strange it will be, but I'm really excited. So final bits and bobs: the bugs have arrived!!!! After 2 months of not seeing any horrible creepy crawlies, I thought my luck was in. Turns out when summer hits, so do they. The other night we had two gianormous cockroaches fly into our room - terrifying!! Two of the girls were huddled on the top bunk shrieking whilst I ran to find a knight in shining armour - Jonas - who promptly came and removed the beasts. Then yesterday I came out of the toilets by the beach to be faced with the biggest (not longest, but biggest) lizard I've ever seen - oh god his head was HUGE and I ran as fast as I could back to my towel...! We also found a couple of Black Widow spiders in the hostel courtyard the other day and the mozzies are now out in force. All in all = EEEEEEKKKK. On the flip side, there's also been some amazing creatures around. So far on the beach I've seen a seal, dolphins, a whale (quite far out), and scarily enough (though I've thankfully not come face to face with one yet) there are sharks out and about. Turns out this stretch of beach is one of the most notorious shark hotspots and there's always a helicopter flying and hovering around on search for them. But that doesn't stop us swimming: yesterday there was a whole group of us on the beach in 37 degrees and the sea was incredible! Just like a mill pond and we played in there for hours. It's days like those that make me realise why I'm here and I just love it :) Right, now off to go get ready for yet another night in work. Love to everyone back home and I'd love to hear updates from people - sorry if I'm terrible at keeping in touch but I do love hearing all of your news and I'm thinking of you all the time! Bonza babys xxxxx
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Amy Sorry...the idea of paragraphs didn't seem to translate when I pasted this entry...!