When all is Said and Done

I kinda ran out of money the last few weeks, and I knew I had a couple more hours of work to do for school, so I decided to look for a job that would be a bit lucrative. One afternoon I was in the mall with Tom, Maria and Laura when they got a call from their boss at Plum, asking if they could work the next few days. Their boss asked them if they knew more people and they looked at me quizzically to see if I had any plans the next days. Perfect opportunity, check, score. I now had a job to hand out flyers on the streets in the business district for Plum Food Australia, paying me almost 25 AU$ per hour, signed a contract and everything. Plums mission was to make it easier for the people working in the business district to find good lunches, by choosing from a list of meals curated by the Plum Food Team. The Team would take the dishes from all over Sydney's centre to one pick-up point, to save these people the time and to prevent them from having to eat the same things over and over again. It was a wonderful concept, but the reality was that Sydney's CBD wasn't the right crowd to try this on.

We would turn the people crazy by standing in the same spot for days straight, same hours every day. I slowly started to recognise those people, well-dressed, never a hair out of place. One day I met a homeless guy who started talking to me about his plan to rob the boss of the business district. He would go up with the lift and then threaten the guy until he would give him money, he said, but I doubt he ever got to carry out his not-so-well-thought-out plan. Plums office was on the Rocks, how they got such an amazing working-space no-one will ever know. How they could pay us is also still a miracle to me, but in the end they did and after a couple more weeks they closed down. August 2nd was Plums official last day.

Kate came back to Sydney too, and she'd been talking about the wineries in Barossa valley in the South of Australia. Barossa valley was too far away to visit, but pretty similar to Barossa, we found Hunter valley, which was a short driving distance from where we stayed in Sydney. I had never booked a wine tour before and I think neither had Kate, so we just chose one that looked cool and wasn't too expensive. The bus that arrived was small, fit about 20 people max, and the driver at first was quite silent. Once we were complete he started talking about all the places we drove past, preparing us for the program of the day. Kate and I bought a bottle of rosé at the first estate we visited where they made the Capercaillie wines. One of the other estates we went to was called Iron Gate estate. We were so incredible lucky with the weather, so we were sat outside with a list and glasses in our hands and a man kept walking around in circles to have everyone taste the wine that they'd made there. We got cheese, crackers and chocolate to combine the wines with. I think we visited 3 or 4 estates in total, all beautiful in different ways, we had had lunch in a restaurant next to a distillery, and we had visited a chocolate shop where they showed us how they made all these kinds of chocolate. At the end of the day Kate and I were dropped off back in Sydney, a bit tipsy from the great experience, holding a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates in the shapes of Koalas and Kangaroos and Turtles.

At that point I was back to staying in Wake-up where I met many really nice people, an American who asked me to marry him the minute he met me, a Chinese-British guy who always looked drunk but wasn't and two Dutch girls that I got along with quite well. One night we ordered a couple big pizzas and garlic bread from UberEats that we ate while sitting on the ground in our room. A few days later we booked a trip out to sea, to go whale watching. Of course I had once again underestimated how seasick I would get, but as if the whales could feel it, they were swimming around the boat, back where I sat with Connie. They were amazing, so close to us as well. I couldn't even comprehend how enormous they were. I think we must've seen a couple dozen of whales, in pairs, in groups, diving out of the water and spraying water out their breathing hole. Dancing around the boat and making a spectacle for us to enjoy, our boat following them around. At the end of the day I realised that every single time I'd gotten seasick the past months, it was absolutely worth it.

In July, they celebrate the peak of winter with some form of Christmas celebration, so what they do is they set up markets: Christmas markets, with the music and the foods and the trees. This festival we were at was called Bastille festival, related to the Christmas in July theme, but focussing on the French cuisine. They put up stalls for wine too, have bands and lights and everything Christmas related. Kate, Laura, Maria and I went to Bondi for a sort of 'goodbye' before we would all go back home, which is where we finally took a photo of the mural that I'd driven past so many times before. You could go ice-skating at Bondi by that time, which was hella expensive, and so we decided to get some drinks during happy hour in one of the bars there. We then decided that we liked Christmas back home more, because it just isn't the same in July, or in Australia for that matter.