Updates on Broome

It's been more than a month since we arrived in Broome. Time's flying as we've been working at least 5 days a week for the last 4 weeks now. After the first week of early wake-ups and brekky shifts, I could 'taste' the late night routine doing dinners on a 5-day roster. And not just dinners, but Stairway dinners with the whole restaurant booked chock-a-block with tables both inside and outside on the lawn. And we were 4 at Charters: me, Ann - the restaurant manager, Rob and Petra, running around, doing more than we could, always going that extra mile. Getting home after midnight, sometimes 2 am. Crazy times, but cool times. And great people. My 5-day roster ended with 2 days off and the following week started with other 2 days off, which was a super relaxing 4-day break. Thanks, Lee, the roster master! :P John had just sent over a bunch of DVDs with all 3 seasons of Lost and Prison Break, so I was becoming a TV(or should I say PC)-addict, but only till the new week at work started off again.

That Tuesday we all went out to Murphy's, an Irish Pub around the corner. Tuesdays are Murphy's nights with a live band and beer pints. The place itself is a typical downtown pub where customers vary from local Abo men and women to international representatives of all sorts of backpackers and Aussies, the nation that more and more seems like a huge pot of different fruits :) Potini from Cook Islands, Mariffe from Fiji, Pita from Indonesia, Jenny from Sweden, Manish from India, Ash and Arpi from India, Wendy from China, John with Maltese origin, James with Greek.. are just a few examples of the people I've met and friends I've made, plus all the backpackers from Germany, Ireland, Italy and so on, so on. And just thinking that the only real Aussie 'breed' are the Abos living in tents and bushes in the sand dunes 100 m away from our resort is so freakin' strange. Anyway, that night at Murphy's I met another interesting 'fruit'. An Aussie airforce guy Vlad whose Russian mum and Peruvian dad met when studying at the University of Moscow. What can I say.. It's one messed up world :) A great messed up world. Vlad joined us to the movies the next night at Sun Pictures, the world's oldest picture garden and open air cinema in operation, est 1916. Although the drama, Notes On a Scandal, could probably win the title of the least entertaining masterpiece I've seen, it was a great movie experience sitting in the funny deck chairs under the stars in a hot Broomian night.

Anyways, the 3rd week I was back to brekkies at 6 am again and we got a group of 50 people coming in for 2 mornings, which kept it busy. And we had a Mother's Day Sunday when Lukie, one of the chefs, baked some delicious pancakes with sugar and syrup :P The next 2 days Paul came in to work mornings with me. Paul and Sam are 2 new waitstaff, a Canadian-English couple. Nice ones. On Monday that week we started another job at Coles Myer, the nr 1 Autralian supermarket chain. Yeah, as if the 40 hours at Mangrove weren't enough, I walked into the supermarket at 5 pm and tried a short but interesting 4-hour Deli career. Did you know how many different sorts of ham there were? If you wish to know more, feel free to ask, but I'll save the rest from details :D My Coles career continued in Nightfill and I got my own aisle: Health and Beauty. The line manager Mattheus thought I'd be good at these products (a) Yey! I love that stuff (especially after the ham nightmare), everything from make-up to hair colours :) So I go there about 4-5 nights a week 4-5 (sometimes more) hours a day and make sure the aisle is stocked and necessary reorders made in time.

Somewhere between the 2 jobs and more than 60 working hours a week, we made some time to celebrate Ray's, one of the barmen, birthday party at Darren's, bar supervisor, house. It was a costume party, the dresscode: Pimps and Hookers :) Ray, the genius, probably had nothing to wear, so his hooker's outfit - a pair of leopard boxers - was a perfect idea. But my cut and torn jeans earned some compliments as well :P The night continued in Bungalow, the town's newest party place with me, Ann, Lee, the F&B manager, Josh, one of the chefs, and Moijito cocktails :P

So it goes.. the life at the Mangrove - our home, our work, our everything.. in Broome. Me and Ann share one of the few staff rooms at the premises, right between the managers, with Lee on one side and Ann on the other :) One, two step.. and we are in the pool and jacuzzi area.. another one, and we're behind our bar or at the restaurant. With our fellow bar mates, cruising through the days, rocking through the nights. Till it's time to go. This week we lost the Irish trio: Chris, Ray and Francis, who left for Darwin, and Erica, a Aussie girl that left somewhere in the same direction, where the German Petra had already gone 2 weeks ago. C'mon, Darwin, don't take them all away from us! Or we must come and get ya! But nature doesn't like an empty place, and neither does the Mangrove. We now have our new Irish Louise, Canadian Brad, Italian Luca and Vanni, and we keep cruising, and we keep rocking, and we keep mangroving day and night :P

And just before I finish my 9-o'clock news break, let me inform you that internet is no longer a deficit in Broome. We bought 2 hours of wifi at MangroveHotspot, but in a place where time does not matter, we got 2 x 2 x 2.. x 2 hours instead. This technological wonderland. The remaining time keeps running somewhere at 1192782:09:12 hours and if my calculation is correct, we're gonna have wireless internet in our room for the next 136 years. I wish my biological clock did the same :)