Making money in Mildura

christinelouise Oceania 2015, Australia, Christmas, factory, farmwork, mfc, mildura, victoria, working

Mildura, Australia: I’ve got a job and purple hair

Oh, Mildura. It’s one of those places that kind of feels like home in the “oh shit, I’m stuck here forever” kind of way. The population is around 30,000 plus a shit ton of backpackers who stay here for orange picking and vine pruning. The city center is so small, it can be fully explored within 5 minutes. In short, Mildura is really, really small and really, really quiet – but not really.

Picking mandarins

Picking mandarins

We arrive on the 5^th of June and move into a freezing house with two French guys and one Italian guy, Andrea. After a few days, our “hostel owner” Vickey moves us to the little cream house on 78 Seventh Street, right on the border of New South Wales. It’s a more centrally located and much smaller house in which Dave, John and Joe from England, and Davide from Italy are already living in. Two bedrooms turned into dorm rooms, a small kitchen and one bathroom. One bathroom for – at one point – almost 10 people.

Living with so many English people, I often forget I’m in Australia. I live in a house where people say “half nine” instead of nine thirty or half past nine. When something’s inexpensive, they might say it is “cheap as chips” – chips are fries, not potato chips, by the way. And for some odd reason, it’s all starting to make sense to me, who learned English by watching American movies.

We are here to complete 88 days of farmwork for our 2^nd year visa. At first, everyone is doing pumpkins on a farm, while I work at a vineyard.

The office

After a few days of rain, we start work in a factory – MFC. I sort rotten oranges from good ones, Sharon operates the machine that packs the fruit into boxes, and the rest of the guys stack the boxes so they’re ready to load onto trucks. I keep myself entertained by finding naughty-looking oranges.

With the days usually spent on work and catching up on Game of Thrones, not a lot of things happen in our lives. We try to keep things fun by going bowling, beer tasting, watching Magic Mike XXL twice, treating ourselves to good food, getting drunk and falling asleep instead of going to bars, and so on. Oh, and dying my hair purple.

Davide, Andrea, John, Joe, Craig, Malin and two random sluts

Goon Heaven!

Our first BIG purchase at Coles. It tookus almost 2 hours and cost us $ 150

On the 25^th of July, we decide to celebrate Christmas (it is Winter, after all) and invite the neighboring house. Sharon and I decide to go crazy with the planning, walking 10 K to go shopping for party stuff one day, and taking the hugest trolley around town for food and alcohol shopping the next. We even buy stockings and little personal presents for all of our roommates, spending over $ 100 each. On “Christmas Day”, we all eat our dinner for lunch and get day drunk on the porch, and I end up getting extremely anxious and end up sobbing in my room before crawling out of the window to go for a two-hour long walk in the park. When I come back, everyone’s wasted to the point where they decide to go out, while I pass out in bed.

Sharon and I make up for it on Sunday by getting day drunk, eating pizza on the porch and listening to the Magic Mike XXL soundtrack for the 100^th time.

So, you see, Mildura’s not so quiet, after all.