mildura's murray river and other fun times

the working hostel we found in mildura turned out to be so much better than the other one. me, hannah and zara took a bus there and i think kay met up with us later on. maria, the girl who worked at the hostel already told us on the phone that there was no work for at least a week or so, due to the bad weather. luckily for me, i found work after a week or two, working in a styrofoam factory. there were a japanese and korean girl already at the hostel waiting for work and the factory needed 3 people. so maria put our names in a hat and pulled mine out, woop woop!! i was so done with farming, so working in a factory was a nice change. of course i was bored to death after i got the hang of it, but the good pay and loud music all day got me through it. i think i worked about 2,5 months in total. the job was really easy, we had to sort out different styrofoam boxes and pack them up in stacks. we worked in two shifts and had to take breaks seperately, but our supervisors were really cool and friendly.

i just remembered our arrival at the hostel. we gave maria our passports and we were allowed to stay without paying and pay back the rent whenever there was work. this way maria knew we wouldn't go anywhere and we knew we were definitely getting work. (i heard somewhere that it's actually illegal for a hostel or any other accommodation to keep your passport, but i actually think it's a good arrangement). we had just sat on our asses in the bus for i don't know how many hours and i remember being in the mood for pizza. we dumped our bags in the room and looked around the place.

it was a small hostel with a living room, tiny kitchen, dining area and two chill areas outside. there was this guy who used to live there and kept an eye on things, but we were pretty much allowed to do whatever we wanted. there were a bunch of other people already living there and we ended up partying together a lot and i had a really good time there, especially when a met a super hot girl in a bar we used to go to almost every weekend, gheghe. anyway....that first evening we walked outside for a smoke and everyone was chilling out there. after about 30 minutes we realized why they were al there. the supervisor guy walked outside with about ten domino's pizzas and layed them out on the ping pong table for us to just grab and eat!!! i was exstatic and couldn't believe it!! apparently friday night was pizza night and i'll never forget the atmosphere at those moments. it was like being part of some national geographic documentary about hungry hyenas fighting over some chunk of meat hahaha. just imagine 10 or so backpackers going absolutely bananas over free pizza. anyone who has backpacked knows exactly what i mean!
in the weekends the hostel would organize trips sometimes. we went to the murray river, a place called orange world and had a bbq at one of the famer's homes. (kay walked into a glass door with a stack of dishes after dinner. it was hilarious and i'm still laughing about it now (she didn't hurt herself btw)). 
mildura is definitily not a bad place to work and save up for a while. it's a small town, yet there's plenty to do and if you have a good bunch of people around, it will be awesome. obviously working sucks, but having the weekends to look forward to makes it go faster. i think we stayed for about 10 weeks or so. there was drama, laughter, drunken nights, movie nights, pizza nights, boobies on the wall (me and hannah were so lesbian deprived that we cut out cleavages out of fashion magazines and made a collage on our wall) endless music videos (it's where my love for lady gaga and rihanna videos grew), partying, stoned conversations and a crazy ass hostel cat who would sneak into our room and pooped in the kitchen sink once.
i spent my last week with the girl i met at the bar and after a midnight roadtrip to adelaide and a bustrip to melbourne, i met up with zara and hannah and their mates in beautiful melbourne where shit was really going to hit the fan.