We Whistle While We Work

After my dad and brother left Brisbane, I waited outside for Samir, who was going to pick me up from the airport to drive me back to Surfers Paradise. It was the first time he'd driven the car, and it was an hour drive back over the highway so that was an adventure in itself, but we made it back safely. The people at Budds Backpackers were all very friendly, especially to Anneke, Samir, Chris and Amarins, who'd been there for a longer time at that point. Since I was their friend I got to hang out with their people and that's how I got my first 'real' job, or the first job I actually made money with.

Chris and a German friend called Leo had been working at some sort of a construction site, half an hour away from the hostel we stayed in. They'd been helping with building a fence and anything else their Aussie bosses wanted to have done. I arrived there and they'd warned me about the man; a very nice, slightly weird, guy if he liked you.. not a very nice man if he didn't. He was very direct and a little bit racist, especially to a very quiet Danish (?) guy that worked at his place. My boss and his wife apparently liked me, because they were really nice and they joked around quite a bit as well. His wife brought us food from time to time, making sure we had enough to drink too, and my boss worked even harder than the boys, welding the fence that they had to put up and teaching me new words while doing it. They were the first people to make me try Vegemite on toast and when I couldn't bear the taste they gave me some cheese and told me to suck it up and be an Aussie. Honestly, toast with Vegemite and cheese is not bad at all. Then there was this thing called finger buns, which is basically a normal white bun with a layer of sugar and coloured ice cream sprinkles on top of it. I worked for these people for two days, then almost everything was done and we left a couple days later to start our trip further up the East-Coast. I made 350$ with these two days of work.

I stayed in Budds for about a week, cooking meals ourselves, playing Monopoly and exploring the Gold Coast, as it's called around Surfer's Paradise. We went out a couple times as well, either for dinner or to clubs with the hostel, since they organised some sort of club-night every night of the week. During the day we went to the beach if the weather allowed it, just soaking up the sun and reading a book or playing ball games with other people from the hostel. Other than that there weren't a whole lot of other options around Surfer's, and one of the days we decided to take our car to Springbrook National Park where there's beautiful hiking, waterfalls, caves and views over the whole park. We spent until sundown admiring this rainforest, swimming in the cold natural pools and drinking a Corona where we felt necessary. We even filmed a short blog at one point.

One of the last days there we decided to go out to a minigolf course we'd walked past a couple of times already. Samir, Amarins, Chris and I played the boys vs the girls and the losers had to dye their hair in the colour of their golfball. Of course we only made up this bet after we'd started playing, so we'd all already chosen our golfballs. Amarins had a yellow one, I a pink one, the boys had both gone with green, which would've been fun. Unfortunately we lost, with just one point. We spent the rest of our night looking through chemists for hair-dye and Chris, with all his non existent barber experience, was given the honour of dying our hair. And that is how I'm still walking around to this day, with a pink glow in my hair.