Employment! At last. I am now a fully qualified grape picker. Which basically requires you to be poor enough and willing enough to take the astonishingly low rate of pay, and the long hours in the sun.
On the plus side I get out into the countryside, I get to breath the fresh air(only moderately laden with the chemicals they have probably sprayed on the grapes the night before) and take part in good honest toil on the land(and toil is right).
Its not that bad really, I'm just essentially lazy, and you have to work quite hard to make money grape picking. You get paid per bucket you fill, the faster you work the more you get paid. They even employ people to take the buckets to big bins on the back of tractors so that all you spend your time doing is picking grapes. You work in a gang of around 30-40 and you pick blocks of grapes. So far we have been working on Pinot Noir, which is one of the earlier varieties.
That all sounds quite civilised, except that the temperature gets up into the 30's in the middle of the day, and it is almost always sunny. You also have to take care not to slice of a finger with the snips you buy to cut the grapes. Its alright if you do though, you just shout medic and they give you a sticking plaster which lasts about 2 minutes until the grape juice your hands are covered in soaks through it.
You may be wondering why they havent invented a machine to do this job, well, they have, but thankfully(?) the grape vines seem to be sufficiently tangled up that it makes human pickers still preferrable.
Now, you may be wondering how much money I get for this easy work, walking along, plucking grapes from the vine, well, I get somewhere in the region of $1.25-2.00 per 10kg bucket. On my first day I managed 55 buckets, which after tax got me about $70. Depressingly its been downhill since then, but its only the start of the season, so the amount of grapes we've been picking is a bit small. In the next few weeks it should pick up though, then I'll have all the grapes I could ever want.
The good thing about grape picking is that it pays at all, since my attempts to get anything different have been stunningly unsuccessful. The people are pretty good too, a fair number of travellers, both foreign and Aussie, along with some regulars who seem to be able to pick about 50% more than I can. That being said, in my first week I think I have managed to pick almost 2 metric tons of grapes. Perhaps I will have picked the weight of a blue whale or a challenger tank by the time I'm finished.
In more exciting news, the Adelaide Festival starts soon, so I can finally get round to seeing some of the acts that have been playing in Edinburgh for the last 5 years. And all I needed to do was come round to the other side of the world to do it!
Hmmm, I'm sounding a bit negative I think. I'm actually quite content, the weather is nice, if a bit hot, the work is dull and monotonous but after a while I think I'll get used to it, and the people seem pretty good which is always the main battle in any job.
As I said I've spent my time job hunting, but thats not what I came half way round the world to do, so I havent entirely filled my time with it. I have done a fair few of the normal touristy things.
Just east of Adelaide is the very German town fo Hahndorf, filled with a wide assortment of twee touristy shops, all german themed. Matt and Kelly took me out there and showed me round the little towns sights, including sweet shops and various purveyors of sausages and other meats. We also had a beautiful lunch at a pub in town, along with a little bit of German beer. Though I can't help but feel I've come to slightly the wrong place for German beer.
Undeterred by the nagging feeling that it isnt quite right having german beer in Australia, I pressed on with the German theme and visited the Schutzenfest, a German themed annual festival filled with lederhosen and cabbage, and of course beer. A pleasant evening of beer drinking and mild amusement at grown men dancing around in silly leather shorts followed.
South Australia is the festival state, and they arent kidding. The next weekend I visited a Greek festival, which to be fair was just a big party with lots of greek people really. But its a festival none the less, and I felt obliged to sample the ethnic delicacies, namely a yiros, which is really just a kebab, and some ridiculously sweet cakes.
This weekend I have the italian festival to look forward to, so again I'm anticipating a significant amount of eating. Eating seems to be the general theme of Adelaide, they say there is around 1 restaurant for every 30 people, which is nice, but there is a refreshing amount of live music around as well, I'm going to see my new favourite band Little Birdy this weekend as well. All in all its pretty civilised really.
Well, yes, I have been lax in writing about my times in Adelaide. I should really give a more detailed update of what I've been upto over the last month or so.
During my time in Adelaide I have spent quite a lot of time half heartedly job hunting. To begin with, I'm lazy, and therefore not overly predisposed to making more work for myself than necessary. Another reason for my lack of job hunting success is that January doesnt seem to be the best month for it. People are only coming back from their holidays and it takes a few weeks for things to pick up. So, I hope with the added incentive of rent coming out of my account every week, February will see me shackled to the capitalist machine once more.
I did have one very brief foray into the world of work, spending a day doing door to door collection work for charity. I thought it would be pretty bad, but maybe if it was going to pay well then I could handle it. 6 hours of knocking on peoples doors and bothering them for money later and I had lost the will to live, let alone work and my determination to stick it out for a week crumbled immediately. The day wasnt a total loss though, the cancer and bowel research trust is now around $100 better off.
Since then I have given my CV to various agencies and applied for numerous positions. The agencies however don't seem to be particularly interested, I guess they have better things to do than finding jobs for people. I think part of my problem is that I havent had enough experience. Unfortunately you need experience to get experience it would appear and I am not the best at showing my talents in the most favourable light.
But really, I should be able to find something soon. I'm even going to talk to a digital effects company tomorrow, though I'm not too hopeful they will be able to offer me a position, what with my temporary visa. It will be interesting to see how a digital effects company works though, I've always wondered exactly how they do all the things they do in films these days.