Dec 22 - Job Hunt Journey

Today involved sleeping until about 1 pm. Got a terrible sleep for some reason and had to sleep in to make up for it. Our Canadian roommate left this morning so Brennan and I have the room to ourselves now. When our roomie left, he gave me a book that he had finished reading; The Snowball; Warren Buffet and the Business of Life, which is exactly 707 pages. So that should keep me busy reading after I finish the Shatner and Ferguson biographies. Brennan ate some cereal but I opted out. We headed over to Starbucks for a couple regular North American style coffees and to read the jobs section of the paper. The coffee wasn't great - something like what you would find at a 7-11 or truck stop, but it was regular filter coffee, none of this espresso/mochiato/americano whatever stuff they drink here, so it was a nice touch of home style caffeine. The jobs in the paper ended up being a pretty poor selection, so after we downed our coffee we wandered to a mall and browsed around to see if anyone was hiring. Brennan bought a copy of Robinson Crusoe to read (he had wanted it for a long time apparently) so that will be his next book once he finished Catch 22. Went back to the hostel to read and use the internet and job search a bit more. Then for supper we cooked up a pack of hotdog-ish sausages we got at Coles the other day. Added some potato chips and carrots and boom, we had ourselves a meal. The sausages were...edible..still probably the closest thing we've found to a hotdog since being here. Brennan went back to reading and I went for a walk. The walk turned into a 2 hour journey all the way to the harbour, and I wrote down names of stores along the way that would be good to apply to and were big enough to have a website. I got a 4 page (little travel diary-sized pages, mind you) list of stuff by the time I finished. From the harbour I walked to The Rocks area, which is trendy with lots of little shops and bistros and cafes, etc. Then I sort of got lost in some residential area near there for a bit before finding my way back into the city and walking back to the hostel. Brennan was still motoring away at his book, so I hopped on the Internet and went through the careers section of every single place on the list I had made tonight. This led to surprisingly few job openings and even less that I could qualify for. I did find a couple reservations and front desk jobs at a couple different hotel chains in Sydney and a couple shoe and apparel stores had open job application submission forms. So tomorrow I'll tweak the resume and fire it off for all the open positions. Might go for a walk through a couple other areas of Sydney too, to see about jobs there. We have to check out of our hostel on the 26th (literal translation of boxing day) and almost all hostels in Sydney are full until after the new year. The ones that are available are charging outrageous rates like $97/night for a 10-share dorm room. So we'll probably have to relocate to Katoomba, which is a 2-hour train ride away (and the rates are $30/night) for like 10 days. This makes finding and getting a job in Sydney an issue if we have to spend 4 hours on the train everyday to get to/from it. It's going to be an interesting end of 2010/beginning of 2011...