Australia: The Land of Opportunity

830am, Thursday May 5th, 2011.  What a big few days!  I arrived in Broome on Saturday from Darwin, where Melissa met me at the airport.  Melissa is really lovely and a lot of fun.  She is putting me up here till I get settled.  Broome is awesome - it's a small pearling town of about 15k people, but in the dry season (may-oct) it gets up to 45k people!  Cable Beach runs alongside Broome and is one of the top beaches in the world!  Beautiful white sand stretches for miles, outlining clear blue water going as far as the eye can see.  Being on the west coast, the sunsets are incredible too.  Melissa often goes for walks on the beach after work, so I've been tagging along.  During our first walk, she said that it's always different and I wondered how the beach, sky and sea could always look so very different.  But now I understand!  Colours, clouds, glossy sand, sun, those little balls the clams make on the beach... Really incredible.  I've been swimming several times (twice yesterday!) and every time I get in the water and look out to sea I get realllllly excited - this pent up energy courses through me and I must do a little jig in the water to expel it. 

Everything is within bicycling distance here which is another huge bonus.  Melissa has a spare bike she's letting me use so I use that to get around between jobs... and shopping.  I really love Target - lots of bargains hehe.  My first job is in town at Lustre Bar & Grill - I'm working on the cafe side serving.  Not knowing how many hours I'd be getting, I went out yesterday to drop off some more resumes and have been asked to come back in today 5pm for a trial at Diver's Bar.  (Trials are done free of charge by the employee for no more than 2hrs.  Seems to be an industry standard here) Quite exciting!  I imagine that'll be serving too, but I'd really like to get into bartending also.  You don't make much in tips here because your hourly wage is so high - but that's OK!  My boss at Lustre said she's put me on 6 days next week, and with Diver's Bar being mostly evenings, it means I should be working about a million hours a week and making lots of money! 

The 10 day tour I was talking about before from Broome to Perth will have to wait until August.  I called a dive shop in Exmouth yesterday and they said last year they were doing the whale shark thing until end of August.  So this year I hope I'll be OK to see them early-mid August.  I probably won't work in Perth, just hang out for a few days then fly up to Cairns.  This is the plan as it stands now; I'm sure it will change in the next 3mths.  Feeling torn right now about how hard I should work on getting a job of "specified work" in a "regional area" to extend my working holiday visa another year... I suppose being only 2mths into the trip, this is not something I really need to worry about yet.  As long as I know what I want to do with about 4mths left on my visa.. Just need to do said specified work (picking fruit, planting trees, building a house etc) for 3 months to qualify.  How exciting it is to think about what the next 10mths will bring...