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For the next weeks I was living in Brisbane. It started all with inspecting a twin room in Indooroopilly, a suburb of Brisbane. We drove the car into the backyard and found a tiny Korean called El sitting on the veranda, playing with his phone. He took us in and showed us the available rooms and the whole house. At that moment an Indian guy called George, El and his other Korean friend were living there. We decided quickly for a twin room with 2 beds. It was actually an easy decision even though we had some other options. One option was moving into a place with a guy who is maniac about his house. We just thought we wouldn't feel comfortable in a place where people spend 5 times as much money on food as us and then expect us to do the same. We also had a bad feeling about that maniac. So we chose the twin room because we were to ourselves, we had a good kitchen and a veranda and the house was a bit more shabby J The next day we grabbed our stuff from Duncan's place, chucked it all into the car and moved to Indooroopilly.
Then many of the other days were filled with our job. Getting up early at around 5 a.m. Working our arses off. Falling into our beds like zombies. Gathering energy to cook something. Falling back into our beds. The job itself is not interesting, I already told you what tree planting means (kneeling down, chucking plants into the ground) but the people we got to know were rather interesting. The first days we were working with the foreman Nathan and his colleague Andrew. Nathan never spoke more than 10 words with us in all those days. Andrew spoke way more but when he spoke, then he was rambling about political injustice and every second word was "f***ing". Both Australians had pretty much given up about their job. Nathan with kids and family worked his arse off, planning to go into mining as another job. We rather could have worked with a stone. There's nothing more to say about Nathan because he revealed nothing more than his inability to communicate. Andrew, an ex-punk, involved with drugs, a constant smoker, drinks his first energy drink at 6 in the morning and well, still considers himself as a punk. There's not much more to say neither. Martin and I had to work as the low class backpackers, running behind the plants, smashing them in as quickly as possible, without rest, without advice on how to plant correctly, without encouraging words nor any thank you, just those 2 people crawling on the ground. This sounds exaggerated and hard but that is the way it was.
After a while Nathan and Andrew drove down to Sydney to complete another job, so we started working with Chad, the manager and boss. At first I really didn't like him but by now I appreciate working with him. Chad is a 37 years old South African who first came to Australia as a backpacker. He is as tiny as a man can be. He has hands as small as baby hands. He has very empty blue eyes. He's always rambling about women because it seems that his mind had stopped developing at the age of 15, at least regarding that matter. He tells everyone about his dates, in all details. When he talks to his employers (since his company is always getting subcontracted), he tells them about his dates. When he talks to his workers, it's about his latest prey. When he talks to his pillow, it's about the plain, but nice woman from last night. I can make a list of women he dated. Where. When. Who. Etc. He has no shame on that matter. Chad treated us very nicely. He picked us up for work, he actually talked to us (big progress!!), he lent us working clothes other backpackers had left behind, he took us out for a swim in the dam after work, he was the first person to say that we did good work (of course not directly to us but talking on his phone he said that he had a very fast crew) and he actually gave us advice on how to plant properly. Chad is really a very curious character. When he talks to you, you actually never know to whom he's talking and what he is saying because he is mumbling around and not addressing his words directly. So this situation is very typical. We just finished for the lunch break. Chad mumbles something and leaves. The three workers of us are waiting in his car for him until he gives us a phone call, asking why we don't come to the lunch room. This kind of miscommunicated situations occur very often with Chad around. One day he called and started to unburden himself. He didn't know what to do about the jobs in the next days, he didn't have enough workers, he was despaired and so on. I calmed him down and offered my help to find workers. In the end he was very happy. Well, that's Chad. So I organized another worker. I wrote an ad on gumtree (a job-seeking website) and after 20 secs (!!!) I got the first call. I directly picked that worker and since then Flo was working with us J In the end Chad seemed really sad about our departure.
Apart from work, living in Indooroopilly/Brisbane means a couple of nice things. The best: football on Wednesdays. Furthermore playing music. Drawing. Watching movies. Cooking. And we actually baked some Christmas cookies last weekend with lovely results. Very colourful and nice shapes, since we had to cut the shapes into the dough ourselves. The Indians who recently moved into the house invited us to a wedding in India. I was very tempted to go.
Well, and then I decided to become au pair on Groote Island.
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