ABOUT | TRAVEL (B)LOG | PHOTOS | MIXED GRILL | MAP
            <<  Byron Bay, 30-Nov-2013  >>

How my life became shit :-)

Dishes, dishes and more dishes. Gay Koala. Waves suck. But my life is amazing anyway, even tough a random homeless man disagreed

After more than 3 weeks of fighting with the universe and avoiding paying for accommodation we gave up the fight, or more precisely we made a break between the rounds, and when our assignment at Robyn’s place ended we moved to a hostel.

I stayed in the hostel room for more than 2 weeks, Irene just one, and rest of the time she was swinging between sleeping at her friends’ apartments, bush, discounted sleeping at hostel’s couch in a TV room and occasional night in the room.

As I started to work, my days became pretty much routine, and there are no amazing adventures to write about, but there are a new noteworthy events. Like these ones:

My job started very easily, with just a few hours a week, but on my second week they fired the other dishwasher and so I had to do all the shifts and fuck I WAS busy. When I would leave the hostel room at 10:00 I already prepared my contact lens case and solution and tooth brush on my bed, because I would return at around 1 o’clock in the morning going straight to bed, and I did not want to irritate the others in the room by switching on the light. The worst shift was my fourth shift or so, when I arrived 5 minutes late (because I had been surfing) and till I changed my clothes it was 10 minutes late and my sadistic boss gave me a big mouthed speech and made me pay the price whole fucking day. I’m pretty sure that he asked other employees of the restaurant to treat me like shit that day and be hard on me, because everyone was giving me ridiculous tasks that were not really necessary but they requested that they would be done immediately. “Mop there”, “Clean this, I need it right away” (but then he didn’t use it at all), “This is not clean, clean it again!” and so on. For 10 hours I was just running from place to place with no time to stop even for 5 seconds. No food, no piss. And the end of the shift, after 1:00am when I was returning to the hostel I walked pass a homeless guy and when he saw me, in my wet work clothes, destroyed by the shift he looked at me and said “man, your life must be SHIT!”. Hahahah, damn right, that day my life was shit! :-)

The job is pretty tough (my longest shift was 13 hours without one second of break) and almost every local that we had met and told him/her that I worked in that restaurant said something like: “Really? I’ve heard that it’s a horrible place!”, but it’s not so bad. The trick is that now when they open the restaurant, let the dishes and pots accumulate, then by the time EVERYTHING is dirty the shift of the dishwasher starta, then I have to run like fucking maniac to clean all that accumulated shit, which takes few hours of non-stop work, and if by any chance I manage to clean everything, instead of spending one hour or so of easy job they send me on a unpaid break for few hours and let the dishes accumulate again and when I come back the place looks like dishwashing inferno and I have to work like an idiot again to clean everything before the last other employee of the restaurant finishes his job so that he can close the restaurant. It’s by no means a relaxing place to work at, but it’s not too bad either. I don’t mind working hard and I get a lot of hours, which means lot of money. Also, I can hardly complain, as my visa is ehm, well, let’s say not the right one, so I can be glad that I got at least some job. Luckily, the sadism of my boss was limited since then, and hell I never came late again, you can bet on that, so it was not too bad.
I have to say, that in some perverted way I like the job. It’s in a way refreshing not to have any responsibility and work manually. The worst thing is the dreams. Damn it, I dream about washing the dished all nights. The god damn plates come in millions and they top up to the ceiling and I had to wash and wash all night through. Reminds me of my Microsoft Excel dreams during my busy consulting years…

One thing that I noticed it that I’m no longer 23 :-)
When I was 23 and was working in summer jobs in USA, I had 2 full-time jobs, working on average 72 hours a week, and I could do it. Now, I’m half way dead even after 40 hours, because they are usually packed into 4 days. Whether I like it or not, the lack of energy, when compared to my younger years is evident.

Now more joyous topic: surfing.
While I was staying at Robyn’s place I bought the cheapest second hand surf board in Australia from a guy few houses down. It’s too small for me, it’s “MC BOARD” (or is it McBoard?), it has picture of some childish koala picture on it and it’s at least 3 centuries old, but for 50 bucks, fuck it, it’s mine. I call it “Gay Koala”. That’s what it is.
Surprisingly when I tried it, on one session with Lukas, I found out that it’s actually probably not too small for me, and it should be OK. But the waves are not OK. Ever since we have arrived to Byron Bay, almost every day there is freaking strong wind blowing from the northeast and it ruins all the waves. The ocean now looks nothing like the ocean as I remember it from June. Back then, almost every day was surfing day, with nice, fat waves rolling in and breaking wonderfully at The Pass break, now it’s shitty choppy waves like in the Mediterranean, pure trash for surfing. Only sometimes the wind ceased, but even then the waves are so much worse than in June. So honestly, I’m hardly surfing these days, and I didn’t even manage to have one good session with Lukas. I hope that as the summer kicks in the conditions will be better, because right now I completely suck. Good old Bali, good old Lombok.

Last noteworthy event is “schoolies”. Schoolies are after-high-school-graduation trips of Australian teenagers. When they graduate from the high school, those of them who can afford it, go for a one week trip somewhere in Australia and they all drink and drug they brains away in one explosive smash. They drink like idiots and behave like idiots. And end of November is exactly the time when the graduations take place, so for 2-3 weeks Byron Bay is flooded by young Aussie teenagers trying to kill themselves my excessive drinking and partying. And so Byron Bay turned to what I had witnessed in Vang Vieng in Laos or Kuta in Bali: vulgar and loud party scene. And actually, in Vang Vieng and Kuta, it was exactly Australian teenagers who made there all the mess. They should be illegal these Australian teenagers, they crawl from everywhere like cockroaches and shout and fight. What’s wrong with you people, why don’t you just get completely drunk and fall asleep like normal people, why do you have to make so much mess? (I’m obviously growing VERY OLD).
The interesting thing is that when the schoolies come, so does the police. And the ambulances. Near a park which served as the main party scene for the schoolies, there were everyday 5-6 police cars, riot squad cars (yes, riot squad), police on horses and 4 ambulances. And when we went to the beach in the night, the mounted police would pass by and shine a torch all around, and every 50m there was some teenager lying in coma, wasted away completely. And every day you would see ambulance taking some teenagers who were in real coma. God bless continental Europe when it comes to drinking. I don’t quite understand what is the differences, but simply this way of drinking, and inability to process it simply doesn’t exist there. Must be something from the glorious English drinking legacy, I guess :-)


Click for photo gallery






     MARCEL STRBAK | www.strbak.com | www.facebook.com/marcel.strbak