Perth... Surprisingly Hardcore

We left Sydney on the 6th of June to head to Perth. We were really looking forward to Perth after hearing all the great things people said about it, “Oh it’s such a pretty and clean city”.  But we were more taken back by all the sex shops, strip clubs (A few were hiring), and face tattoos. Surprisingly there were a lot of tattooed faces (including a couple that were pushing babies in strollers), which equals hardcore, and somehow people left this out when describing the city. 


Perth is the biggest city in Western Australia, but it’s tiny compared to Sydney. There’s a huge Asian influence here that can be felt through the Asian-style restaurants and massage parlors (Insert happy ending joke here).
James St. has loads of hostels, restaurants, bars, cafes, and an unusually large jumbo-tron. The giant TV over looks a grassy lawn and café were people sit out and well, watch TV... in a sort of creepy utopian society kind of way. There are also permanent stools on the sidewalk and at night, they glow, which makes for a cool sight.


Across the street is a bright blue restaurant, Valentino’s, separated from the park by a massive modern art piece, a squiggly black and white arch. We ate breakfast at Valentino’s, we read it has the best breakfast, and it was good. Also along James St is the Old Shanghai food court, which has some of the cheapest eats in Perth, but it’s Perth, so it’s not that cheap. They have an awesome dim sum place in the back.


The highlight of our time in Perth wasn’t in Perth at all. A two-hour ferry ride from Perth is Rottnest Island. We spent the day cruising the island on bikes (there are no public cars allowed on the island). It was a nice day to ride around and see the island’s pretty beaches. There’s also supposed to be some great snorkeling sites there as well, but as we were there at the beginning of winter, it was just too cold to hop in. For this reason, we’d recommend going in the warmer months. 

We also encountered Rottnest’s famous Quokkas. The smallest animal in the Kangaroo family, which looks very much like a cross between a kanga and a rat. As you can read in any guide book, the Dutch explorer who first discovered Rottnest island, thought the quokkas were in fact rats, and named it “Rottnest” (which is apparently Dutch for “Rat’s Nest”). How charming. They are mostly nocturnal, so we didn’t see any at all, until the end of the day, when they seemed to be everywhere. Lots of people feed them, so they come right up to you begging for food. But resist the temptation to feed their furry little faces, even simple things are bad for their health, and they are an endangered species.


We had a great time in Perth tattoo watching, eating good food, and making new Quokka friends on Rott-Awesome Island. Click here to check out our Awesome Rottnest Island Video on YouTube

How We Won a $10,000 Trip Across Australia!

Hello! Or G'Day Mate!

We would like to send a HUGE thank you to TNT Down Under Magazine, OZ Experience, and to everyone who watched our video on YouTube! If you haven't seen it quite yet, what are you waiting for?? Check it out at:

OZ Experience TNT Down Under WINNING VIDEO!

And if you're still hungry for more awesome CazzMatt videos check out our incredible YouTube page to see some of the funny videos we made on our travels, like swimming with seals, ZORBing, and feeding birds out of my mouth, which grossed out my mom.

So after watching our winning video you’ll obviously see sex sells and by that I mean a fat guy running around in his underwear.

First things first, let us introduce ourselves. We’re are the dynamic duo Cassie and Matt aka CazzMatt! We both hail from the San Francisco Bay Area, we recently finished University, then took off to farm in Hawaii , from there we joined 2 good friends from the farm and backpacked all over New Zealand, and now we're working and living in fabulous Sydney.

We can't wait to get started on our AWESOME adventure all over Australia!! Basically we get what's called the Fair Dinkum Pass, which allows us to travel all over Australia for up to 6 months.

We'll start by departing from Sydney, which has been our beloved home for the past 6 months, but more importantly we're getting away from our LAME roommates! Shortly after leaving Sydney we'll arrive on the West Coast of Australia in Perth where we embark on a 10-day journey heading North to Broome, all thanks to Western Xposure. Naturally we'll be doing cool stuff all along the way like hiking through national parks, feeding dolphins in Monkey Mia, and swimming with whale sharks. Then we'll make the leap to Darwin where we'll wrestle crocodiles and swim with them in the Cage of Death! How awesome does that sound?! A CAGE OF DEATH! Crocodile Dundee would be so proud.

Then we hop on a flight to Cairns, maybe spend a few weeks there, sail the Whitsundays through the eco certified Explore Whitsundays, snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, and not pull a "Shen Neng" and run a ground on a precious coral reef.

From there our details are a little uncertain. We have the choice to take as long as we want down the East Coast, so we might take our time, maybe work, and then finish traversing down to our beloved Sydney again. We keep heading south to Melbourne, then make the swim to Tasmania, and back up to Adelaide. Lastly, we shoot up the center of OZ, while taking in the sights at Uluru (The giant red rock) and finish back in Darwin, for more CAGE OF DEATH!!

This is going to be the trip of a lifetime and we're looking forward to bringing everyone along for the ride, please make sure to subscribe to our blog and watch our ground breaking videos of our crazy adventures.

Cheers,

CazzMatt

How to Find a Job in Sydney and not have it SUCK!

Now that we had a phone number and address to slap on our resumes, we set out to find work. Job hunting probably sucks even more than apartment hunting. Be ready to hear “No” a lot. While Gumtree is helpful, it’s best to just hit the streets, show up in person, and don’t give up. One roadblock we hit was backpacker discrimination. Many employers assumed all backpackers looking for a job would end up moving on in a couple weeks, and leave them high and dry with the same position to fill yet again. It’s important to set yourself apart from this stereotype by telling potential employers that your plan is to stay in Sydney a long time, duh. Also, chain stores like Cotton On or Gloria Jean’s, are less likely to hire backpackers, so look for privately-owned restaurants or stores. Another great thing with family owned business is they’re more willing to pay “under the table”, which eliminates high tax rates. Matt interviewed at a Cotton On clothing store for a managerial position but after a group-interview was notified that they weren’t interested, which is for the best, because it would suck to work there!! Not that he’s still bitter about it or anything.

Matt found a job at a nightclub in Darling Harbour as a “glassier” or “bus boy”. IT SUCKED! It sucked so hard. Working till 3am, getting home at 4am is not a normal life, unless you’re a vampire. Then it’s very normal. Thank god Cassie found a good waitress job at a respectable restaurant, and they just happened to be looking for another person, so they gave Matt a shot and it all worked out! A common practice for employers is to give potential employees a test run. Which means they call you in and you work for 1 day, sometimes at your own expense (i.e. no pay). As long as you don’t set the place on fire, it’ll work out and they’ll hire you. So that’s what happened, and Cassie and I were fortunate enough to work together at the world-famous, 1^st class, gourmet restaurant: The Hyde Park Barracks Café! Another great part of working at a restaurant is, if your boss is as awesome as ours was at Hyde Park Barracks Café, they’ll feed you after your shift, and our restaurant was a great place to eat.

If you plan to work in the food service industry, like as a waiter, bar tender, etc. You must have a RSA (Responsible Service of Alcohol). It’s a one day class where you sit in a classroom and listen to an old retired bar tender lecture you on all the crazy drinking laws in New South Wales that everyone seems to ignore anyways. It’s more like a punishment, like Traffic School. But it’s easy, and afterwards you can legally work in a food or drink service establishment. We took our RSA in Bondi; it was the cheapest, like $60 or so. Also, to work in Australia you obviously need a Working Holiday Visa and a Tax File Number (TFN). The Visa you can and should apply way before you even get to OZ, but the TFN you can only get when you’re here and have a permanent address.

It’s important to dress the part. The standard uniform for working in most restaurants and bars is a black t-shirt or button up, so if you plan on being a waiter, it’s a wise investment to buy a black shirt. Cheap options are available at K-Mart or Paddy’s Market. If you can, choose the latter of the two. Paddy’s is a cheap, dirty underworld in China Town; it’s awesome! It’s literally underneath a real mall and it’s packed to the rafters with knock-offs, discounted tourist crap, and food that I wouldn’t really trust. Hopefully you’re familiar with the Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes 1993 summer blockbuster, Demolition Man. In the movie there exists a dirty, noisy underworld buried away from the daylight where filthy under-dwellers eat rat burgers. That’s what Paddy’s is like. It’s a must see and there are some great bargains to be had, at Paddy’s that is. Demolition Man is good too.

Working visas differ for different countries. As Americans we can only work at one place for 6 months and 1 year total in Australia. European residents have the option of picking fruit for 3 months to re-new their working visas allowing them to stay much longer. Also, don’t come here and assume a University degree will automatically land you a job. We both have B.A.s from San Francisco State, but we’re waiters, obviously college was a giant waste of time!

So when it’s your turn to start looking for work in a wild hurry in Sydney, remember our tips:

o      Have a personal phone number for prospective employers to reach you at.

o      Grab a black shirt, and wear it when dropping off resumes and at your interview, too.

o      Get your RSA certificate and TFN number early.

o      Don’t rely on only the Internet to get a lead on a job. It can help, but it’s not the end all be all.

It’s best to show up in person, shake hands, and hopefully find a job that doesn’t totally suck.

How to find an Apartment in Sydney and not have it SUCK!

So here’s our story on how we found our apartment in Sydney along with our awesome tips on how to find an apartment and hopefully not have it suck.

Sydney was our home for the past 6 months. It is a beautiful city with tons to do and probably the best place to be for New Year’s Eve. But just like any big city, in order to do awesome things, it requires money. After all the pricey CanyonSwinging, ZORBing, swimming with seals, hiring a car, and Matt’s insatiable food habit in New Zealand, we were just about dead broke. However, by hustling hard, using charm and good looks, a job was soon found...then Matt found one too.

When we first arrived in Sydney, we thought we could simply walk into one of its countless hostels and find work there in return for free accommodation. We couldn’t have been more wrong! Seems that every other smelly backpacker has the same idea, and when we inquired at hostels the common response was “Well, if you stay here for a month or more, maybe there’s a chance we can hire you”. On hearing this, all we could think was “A MONTH?? ARE YOU CRAZY?! WHO HAS THAT KIND OF TIME?! WE NEED JOBS NOW!! I JUST SHIT MY PANTS!” As our brains exploded with the fearful realization that our whole plan of working in a hostel was a failure, we knew we needed to change our game plan, FAST.

While job-hunting, we stationed ourselves at a hostel in Kings Cross, the red light district of Sydney. Kings Cross lives up to it’s reputation; it’s chock full of strip clubs, sex shops, seedy bars, and crack heads roam the streets freely. It’s a quaint place really, full of life and bad decisions. Our best tip for finding a hostel is to have a look at the rooms before you pay. We walked into several places that we would never want to lay our heads for fear of finding bed bugs, stinky beds, or a transvestite hooker. We saved ourselves a lot of grief by checking a few places before we settled down. One block off the main drag of King’s Cross is a street filled with hostels, so there are loads of places to stay there, but they fill up fast in the warm season, so plan ahead.

Once we had a place to leave our massive backpacks, we set out to find more permanent (and affordable) housing. Even the cheapest hostel is more expensive than renting a room in an apartment, so the faster we could find a room, the better it was on our pockets. The best place to find cheap apartments or house shares is either on Gumtree Sydney or Domain Sydney. Unfortunately Craigslist hasn’t caught on here like in the States. These sites often offer better housing options for backpackers, because you are usually subletting from someone who either owns or is renting the apartment, and therefore you are not required to sign a lease or undergo a credit check, and many rooms come fully furnished. Before we could start contacting potential roommates, we needed to go out and get a prepaid mobile (cell phone). This is so that we could leave messages, and have a number for people to call us back at, this is also very important to have when passing out resumes for a job. We went with the cheapest plan at the Vodafone stand at the mall, $30 a month. Vodafone is the cheapest, but Telstra has the best coverage.

When budget apartment hunting, be prepared to hate your life and see a lot of horrible living facilities people call their home. We found one room on Gumtree that sounded promising. It was on the 20^th floor of a downtown high-rise apartment, with reasonable rent, and loads of natural light. We could only imagine the awesome view from the 20^th floor! We thought we found a gem. That was until we walked in and found 14 other people living there! That’s 12 people all using the same bathroom! And yes, the room was sunny; that’s because it was a sunroom on the balcony with no real walls! The only reason it was up for rent was because the girl living there got pregnant and had to move back to Thailand. We obviously passed on that room and ran back to a 2-bedroom apartment room we saw earlier with only 4 people living there. But the 20^th floor sunroom did have a nice view.

After 3 stressful days of apartment hunting we found a fully furnished master bedroom in Pyrmont, which is just past Darling Harbour, pressed up against the Sydney Fish Market, and about a 20 minute walk from Sydney’s City Business District. It was a great location; close enough to the city, but not as expensive as a room in the CBD, and only 4 other people living there. We had one bedroom, the room across from us had a couple living in there, and two more girls lived in a fake-makeshift room in the living room. It had been built with cloth and plywood walls, which we dubbed “the enclosure”. Everyone was Korean except us. We paid $310 a week, which seemed to be a pretty average payment in Sydney. Of course this varies. Some people were shocked to find out we pay $310 per week to live with 4 other people, but you have to keep in mind it came fully furnished with Internet and included all the rice we could eat, no joke, there was always a giant bag of rice in the kitchen. We never asked where it came from, we just ate it. Seeing as we had only come to Sydney with basically just the clothing in our backpacks, this was perfect for us. We didn’t need to go out and buy kitchen wear, a bed or other basic things one needs to live, but can end up costing a fortune once it all adds up.

We ended up really loving the apartment, but hating our roommates. Anyone who has shared a home with others, knows how hard it is to find normal people to live with.

Read our next blog for our stories and tips for finding a job in Syndey without having it suck!