WEBSITE: https: //www.jessieontheroad.com/
GitHub: https: //github.com/Jessie-jzn
It's been four whole months since I came to Australia, and the biggest feeling is that life won't be as logical as I imagined, and I have to rely on myself for everything.
When I first arrived in Sydney, I stayed for a month and a half. After completing three newbie tasks on takeaway platforms, I spent most of my time on vacation. Every day, I slept until I woke up naturally and then went out, walked all the streets and alleys of CITY, and took more than 20,000 steps a day all on my legs. The thing I looked forward to most at night was Hungry Jack's fries 🍟. I wandered around by myself on trains and ferries, very chill and comfortable, as long as I made enough money to pay for my accommodation every day.
Hit a lot of wish lists during that time:
✅ Take a photo in front of the Sydney Opera House
✅ Sunbathe at Bondi Beach
✅ Watch whales in the winter in June
✅ kiama-gerringong hike
✅ See Van Gogh Monet's famous paintings at the Art Gallery of NSW
✅ Self-study at the State Library of NSW
✅ Watsons Bay hike
✅ Little Bay hike to hit up the Dishonored filming location.
Then I started to submit my resume, only to realize that Sydney is too competitive, and I have almost no advantage with my poor English. So I decided to go to a remote town and started looking at cars and inspecting them with all my might. At that time, I was so anxious that I couldn't find a suitable car for two weeks (in fact, if my budget of 5000 was raised to 8000, I could buy one very soon), and I felt that I was neither working nor vacationing, and the time was running out. Determined that night, I took a 17 hour bus ride north to Brisbane, got the car within a week and drove to town again. Luckily, two white labor jobs were found in another week.
Before I landed in Australia, I naively thought I could quickly get into the ideal rhythm: working during the day, traveling on my days off, and improving my English on the side. But the reality was that I was overwhelmed by the small things in life. My English is not good, my hearing is not good, I can't pronounce kitchen as chicken, and I can't even answer back when I'm frozen in place. When I go to the supermarket to check out, or go to the post office to pick up a courier, I often make jokes because I don't understand. Later on, I could only speak with my head, even if I stuttered, I had to make the other person understand. Until now, the spoken language is still bad, but at least, I can do all the things I need to do.
At work, although in the town to get two good pay white labor, but most of the time are purely physical work, one stop is several hours. This has actually been considered a good opportunity in whv, and has made me more afraid to let go, always thinking what to do if I can't find such good shifts in the future. So shifts come to all take, often fifty to sixty hours a week, tired feet are not their own. I earned more than 2,000 RMB a day, which was great to see, but my body and spirit had long been drained. The only thing I rely on is piling up working hours and stacking exchange rates, which has nothing to do with "getting rich".
It is true that money can be saved, but the price is that life is so full that there is almost no time for oneself. The "working vacation" that I had promised before coming here was to go scuba diving, travel, and laze around in a small town. But the reality is that when I work more hours, my life is crammed into going to work and sleeping. The scenery around me is obviously beautiful, but I often have no time to see it. Not to mention that plans like learning English and taking the IELTS test were almost always put on hold.
The hardest part was actually the nagging feeling. It is a Chinese habit to be afraid of missing an opportunity, and always want to fight a little bit more. But in the end, you can't help but ask yourself, "What am I really doing here?" There is no sense of belonging and no clear answer. In the cycle of going to work and sleeping every day, I occasionally think of the original "working vacation", but I realize that more often than not, I am just a machine that keeps working.
In these four months, I still haven't found the answer. The satisfaction of saving money is very real, but the lack of life is just as blinding. So, WHV is ultimately a journey, not an answer. It's like a mirror that shows us the choices we have to make in a difficult situation, and it's also like a fork in the road that shows us that there are so many ways to go in life. Some give up early, some bite the bullet, some clock the scenery along the way, and some search for meaning in the confusion. No one is right or wrong, they all belong to their own version. Perhaps this is the so-called "working vacation", the degree is the state of mind, work is life.