Craig & Sam Down Under

Hello Everyone!  Sorry for the delay in writing a blog recently, we’ve been massively busy.

 Since we arrived in Adelaide about a month ago things have changed rather dramatically, but I think we’re almost sorted now and things are starting to resemble a normal life.  After the disastrous experience that was grape picking, we began to have big money worries.  Picking the grapes was hard work, long hours and very very poor pay.  We felt for the first time since arriving in Australia, as if we were really trapped.  Travelling has so much freedom and relaxation associated with it that it was hard to suddenly find ourselves miserable, broke and too poor to go anywhere! 

A couple of times we looked for work elsewhere but found few results as we were restricting ourselves to only wanting to work for a few weeks and having to live on caravan parks.  We called the harvest-trail hotline who’ve helped us to find work in the past, only to be sent on a wild goose chase into the outback North of Adelaide and come up trumps.  We were told there would be citrus picking and pruning on the grapes, but due to the massive increase of citrus imports in Aus, many farmers were refusing to pay out to have their fruit picked, as they weren’t sure if they would be able to sell it and preferred to save money and leave it on the trees.  The pruning on the grapes wasn’t due to start for a few weeks and we couldn’t afford to wait that long.  We started to consider the possibility of finishing our travels in Australia as quickly and as cheaply as possible, using credit cards and then to sell the van once we got back to Sydney to pay off the cards and come home.  It would have meant that we would be flying home even before Mum and Dad J were due to come out here on holiday! 

So, in sheer desperation, we bought a paper, shelled out a fortune to set up camp in an internet cafe over a weekend and sent out copies of our CV to every man and his dog.  We agreed that we would be willing to take a city job, work for longer than we had originally wanted to and be prepared to move into a hostel or something if there were no caravan parks near to whatever work we found.  There was a big ad in the paper for a Ski resort in New South Wales looking for people to do all kinds of jobs over the winter ski season so we applied over and over  again for as many of those jobs as possible, as well as everything else in the paper and every work agency in town.  Monday came and we sat anxiously by the phone.  We kept asking ourselves, have we done everything we can possibly do to help ourselves? 

We walked around town looking for ads in shop windows, called numbers in the paper and eventually agreed to call one of the marketing companies that was advertised.  We really didn’t want to  go and be door-knocking sales people, but we had to try something.  Out of two that we called, one had a really friendly, helpful receptionist and the other was a bitch (sorry nan).  So we went for an interview with the friendly ones and when they invited us to go out with a couple of their people the next morning to watch how they work and find out more about the job and company, we decided to bunk off the interview with the bitch and do this instead.  It turned out great, the girl was really friendly, the companty appeared to be legitimate and the opportunity was there to start immediately.  We went back to the office for a chat with the Managing Director and attended a training session the next day.  Ever since then (about three weeks ago) we’ve been working as independent contractors (so technically self employed, can work for as long as we want and quit at any time) for Viper Marketing.  We attend a morning meeting each day for training and motivational, erm, stuff, then we go out to shopping centres all around Adelaide and we stop people as they are walking past to offer them the chance to swap their home phone billing over to the company that we promote, who’re doing quite a good deal right now.  It’s not difficult to get sales, so we’re managing to earn a living based wholly on comission and we’re already working our way up the ladder through the company.  Craig got promoted this week to a leader, so when he recruits some more people he can run his own team and will start to get paid overrides (a percentage of thei earnings), I’m hoping to get promoted by the end of this week too.  It all sounds very promising and we’re enjoying ourselves for now.  We’ve got a good 5 months left on our visas and only a very small part of Australia left to see, so we’ll carry on working and see where this company can take us!

 Mum and Dad J are coming out on holiday this week and we’ll see them here in Adelaide the week after, which will be really nice.  It’s great to be able to put them up here now we finally have a job and a house – oh yeah!  We’re living in a shared house now with an Indian guy, a New Zealand guy, an Aussie woman and a German!  It’s cheap rent, the people are friendly and it’s far easier to keep our nice new business suits and work stuff neat and tidy now that we’re not living in the van any more.  The lease is for 3 months and our landlord and landlady live right next door, they’re lovely people too.  The van is up for sale and we had the first people take a look at it today, who were very impressed so it could actually be sold!  We’re going to get a little car with some of the money we get for the van, which will be more convenient for getting around the city and we can still finish our travels in it as there isn’t far to go in Australia that we haven’t already seen!

 I can’t think of anything else to say, although I’m sure I’ve forgotten a million things.  Happy Birthday to Danielle and Vicki for a couple of weeks ago!  Miss you guys.  We hope everyone back at home is well, we’re missing you all oodles of course.

email us if you haven’t and thanks for the comments – Sue & Gino, you will get the hang of it soon!

Love Team England xx