Dec 10 - Job Hunt Begins and Odd Food

Got up and dressed nicely today then walked over to Hays job recruitment agency to see if we could chit chat with someone about employment. Got there and were told to email our resumes and they'd get to us when they get to us. Awesome service for the win. A little dejected, we stopped for some late breakfast; I had some pizza and B opted for a kebab. We figured it'd maybe be best to just go online and send out the resume, so we headed back to the hostel. Browsed for job sites for awhile, then came the time for the bus to Coogee beach for a BBQ with other Base guests. I wasn't feeling up to it though (had my fair share of swimming, beaches and walking lately) so I stayed back to get a jump on the job search, while Brennan and Sarah went to the BBQ.

I headed up to my room and polished my resume, created profiles/accounts with Hays and mycareer.com.au on their websites and emailed my resume to a Hays recruitment specialist also. The MyCareer site was cool, it scanned my resume and picked out all the job experience, then asked a series of questions about each previous job to identify the specific skills I used and had learned with each. Then it created a profile page for me, where I added a photo, my resume, and what I'm looking for in a job, etc. and it even made skill maps based on the skills identified in the questions. So the idea is that employers will look at the profile page and see if I am a good match for their company and then contact me if I am. Not sure if that will actually occur, but in theory it sounds good. That took quite some time to finish all up, and after I got to Christmas shopping. I spent a good hour browsing on Amazon.com and found good gifts for everyone then went to checkout and it wouldn't ship any of them to Canada (sigh). So I had to go to Amazon.ca and look for the items again. The problem was that a few of the items aren't available on the Canadian version of the website (which I think is the stupidest thing EVER, but I won't get into that rant now) so I had to spend another good while looking for new gifts. Once I was satisfied, I paid up and they are presently being shipped to Canada as we speak. The internet can be a wonderful thing sometimes. It would have been nice to send some gifts from Australia, but the shipping time and cost to get them home is outrageous...

Brennan and Sarah got back shortly after I finished my xmas shopping and said the BBQ was good and that they did the Coastal Walk from Coogee to Bondi (Brennan and I had walked it in the opposite direction when we were in Sydney the first time). Having not eaten for hours now and their BBQ having been a few hours previous, we opted to go in search of food. Vietnamese was the consensus and we wandered the Asian areas by Darling Harbour, but couldn't find any Viet places, so we settled for Chinese and were seated at the Golden Dragon. We all ordered a chicken/noodle dish which sounded delightful on the menu. Unfortunately it looked and tasted pretty awful and wasn't at all what we expected. My chicken/corn soup was also very odd, with the consistency being quite similar to mucous. Yum. So after choking down our meals, we exited and headed straight to Krispy Kreme, and the 2 donuts we each had were much better a meal than the Chinese food. For "dessert" we had a chocolate dipped cone from Hungry Jack's. Went back to the hostel for some retro TV watching (old episodes of Friends, Dharma and Greg, Mad About You, etc...ya, old tv) then bedtime.