The bartenser had never heard of Clamato.
Today the whole group had an orientation session. We were told about accomodation, travelling and work, the usual sales pitch. Which by the way, provided me with enough information to consider changing my plan of travel. I now plan to head south to Melbourne. I'll visit Tasmania if time and money permits. Then I'll head to Perth for Christmas. I'll head up the west coast and be in Darwin after February so I'll miss the wet season. Then, I'll come down to Alice Springs and head over to the east coast. I plan to do all of this within a time frame of 8 mos. The reason I am travelling in this direction is because I was told I would be following the sun. By the way, Ozzies have the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.
We also learned some of the Ozzie talk. . . Fair dinken means are you for real, and many words are shortened with an 'ie' added at the end, like barbie. I returned to the hostel to find my backpack with everything intact--YEAH!!.
Our next adventure was into Sydney. The downtown looks similar to Vancouver, well with the tall buildings, but is much cleaner. We didn't come across any beggars and there were a few vagabonds. In the city, everything is a little more expensive. For instance, a bag of chips cost AUS$ 1.30 and a pop is AUS$1.50. The people are very well dressed. Women and men were wearing suits. With backpacks and all, we stick out like sore thumbs as tourists. There is a lot of traffic, on foot and in vehicles. It's funny because whenever I was walking towards somebody, I would want to veer right, meanwhile the person walking towards me would head the same way. It just seems so normal to go right, but by the end of the day I was making a consious effort to go left.
The group was taken to the International Exchange Programs office. IEP is a host organization program to S.W.A.P. In the office, there are job postings, a travel agancy called UNI and FREE INTERNET ACCESS! Internet access is not hard to come by in Sydney, but it can add up fast when you're paying $2 for 12 min. Rates vary eveywhere though and there are better deals. I found a job posting for taking care of horses with positions being listed as throughout Australia. I have not looked into to this as of yet.
I went to the Common Wealth bank to deposit my money in my new account set up by S.W.A.P. and get a pin number for my ATM card. Then headed over to the taxation office to apply for a taxation file number. I will be paying 29% interest on all of my earnings.
A couple of us headed over to the Opera house (7 nuns in a rugby scrum according to some ozzies). It is much different than the pictures. It is off white with a hard exterior shell. I've always imagined it to similar to the sails at Canada place. It's huge!
That night, most of the group was at the pub for dinner and we had a social evening. Everybody has very different traveling plans, which was interesting to hear about. The bar doesn't accept tips. The bartender also has never heard of clamato, or having this in beer. I settled for tomato juice.
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