Working in Perth

Lots of things have happened in the last little while, sort of.

Last Saturday, we went out with some friends to watch the footy final. It was a pretty fun time, but the home team (the West Coast Eagles) lost by about four points. Australian football is a funny sport. It is the only game with four goal posts per side instead of only two. If you kick the ball between the inner posts it is six points. If it goes between the outer posts, they say, "Don't feel bad. That was a good try, have one point, we get the idea of what you were trying to do." Even though our team lost we had a good time. It is fun to watch a big game like that with a big group of fans because of all the cheering and booing.

Monday was the Queen's birthday. Think May Long in September. We went to the beach with our friends to Celebrate. They fished a little while while we went body boarding. I about got folded in half and swished pretty good once. Much harder and it would have been a spinal injury. My sinuses were burning for the next few days. It is really important not to try to breath salt water. It isn't as good as it seems.

Yesterday morning I got up at 4:30 to go to the produce market with the owner of the fruit and veg shop where I work. It is a pretty interesting system. There are 20-25 wholesalers. Many of them carry the same types of fruit and vegtables, but there are slight variations. Some come from the east coast, for example. Each salesman is responsible for around three or four fruit or vegtable varieties in their particular area. Meaning that most of the wholesalers have four or five salesmen or more, some are smaller operations though. The buyer will ask the price and a short haggling session will ensue. Generally the buyer and seller know each other and can read each other so the will arrive at a price fairly quickly, although some people seem to take longer than others. There has to be give and take to be successful, you can't just take, take, take all the time or the other guy won't like to do business with you. At one of the wholesalers my boss's favorite saleman was on vacation, which was too bad because he didn't like the other guy very much. He said that they could read each other very well. Another thing he said to do was tell them you'll take five. If it isn't a really good buy but you can tell the seller really wants to move the produce, take five because when your stuck short of something you can ask them if they can give you five and get a better deal.

I got back from the fruit shop in time to go straight to the restaurant and did dishes until around 10:30. It was a really long day, but we're hoping to save up as much money as we can here in Perth.

The idea is to scrape together enough money to do somthing really fun on the east coast. We're thinking of looking in to going to antartica since we are so close already. Maybe on a cruise or something.

-Gary Milner