So here I am after a week working at Tong Park, I really have to get used to this, it’s so different from anything I’ve ever done, but more of that later, let’s begin from the start :) !

Well, I arrived at Dalby (which is situated around 250km from Brisbane) on a Monday evening. I got off the bus and waited at Hungry Jack’s as instructed; after about 30 minutes a car pulled up and I got to meet the woman that was going to “install” me in my new Dalby house. I was told that the farm was about 45km from Dalby, and that it was below zero in average many of the nights. Well, arriving at the house I got introduced to my new house-mates; 2 Burmese dudes and a Dutch guy.  The 2 Burmese guys didn’t talk much English at all so after some tries I started talking to the Dutch guy. He was a very “closed” person so I really had problems starting a conversation with him; I started asking questions but they were all meet with a “no-answer answer”; let me just give you some examples. Me: “So how is it working at Tong Park?” him: “Well, it’s a work…what is there to say (then all silence)”, me: “So for how many hours are we working?” him “It depends”, me: “What about the pay then, it’s 18.50$ per hour right?” him “It depends, some gets paid more”, me: “So do you get paid 18.50$ per hour or what?” him “yeah, something like that”, me: “So when do we get up in the morning?” him” Well, really depends if you are a morning person or not”, me “Well, how long a drive is it in the morning to the farm then?” him “I don’t really know”, me: “Well, approximately, you know, is it like a 2 minutes’ drive or rather like a 2 hour drive?” him: “Nah, it isn’t 2 hours”; and so on. I could see that the conversation wasn’t getting anywhere so I just went, “well, guess I’m better off just finding out by myself, isn’t that right?”, it was (obviously) meet with silence; so instead of talking I just went onto watching TV; Bear Grylls was on, and he was trying to get warm with some fire in a cave, and that really got me feeling that it was beginning to get cold. At around 9 o’clock it was starting to get very cold, and my house mates were starting to go to bed, so I thought I’d do the same. There was nothing on my bed (linen, pillow, and so on) so all I had my lightweight summer sleeping bag! Some hours after the light got turned off I still weren’t fallen asleep, it had got super-cold and I was totally rolled together, all shivering, trying to get warm, but my summer sleeping bag was definitely not gonna help me on that one! I think that I didn’t sleep more than one hour that whole night, it really was my coldest night ever in my entire life; you could see the condense when I was breathing, so I’m sure it was around zero degrees in the house!! I kept thinking about Bear Grylls tips on how to get warm and how a fire would do wonders in this situation, but then again, turning on a fire in the house would properly be a bad idea.

Well my Dutch roommate got up at around 4:30am, and I (of cause) was already awake so I just followed. After some breakfast we caught the bus out to the farm situated about 1km from a tiny village called Warra. After about 50 minutes we arrived at the farm, and we started going towards a smaller (on-farm) bus, then I was (finally) helped by the Dutch guy who told that I was due to wait at the main office instead of following the group, and so I did. The office wasn’t opened yet so I had to wait outside for about an hour, and it was still freezing (my body was still in dead cold after the long night). Well after the office folks arrived I got in and began signing papers, I think I must have put my signature around 50 different places, it was insane (had to sign that I understood every single rule separately); I’m pretty sure an hour or so passed by just doing that. I was put on the farm maintenance team, so most common duties would include moving stuff, building stuff and tearing stuff down.

Well after my introduction it was time to work, I was given a car that I had to connect to a trailer and then take it to another station. After finding the station I had to reverse the car with the trailer through a small gate, thing was I’d never before backed up a trailer in my life, and just to make it worse it was even my first time driving a car with the steering wheel in the right side. So as you can imagine I struggled a little getting that trailer through the stupid gate. It took me about 5 tries till I got it right, but I was still kind of satisfied about my effort being the first time doing it ever! After I had to manually load old pig feeding trays to the trailer and then finally drive them down to the scrapyard (also called China Town xD). That continued on for the whole day. When I got home I went straight to bed without having dinner, because that first day loading pig trays really tired me out, to not talk about that silly hour of sleep I had the night before. That night it wasn’t as cold as the first, so I managed to get more sleep compared to my first night, even though it was still super cold.

The following days were pretty much the same as my first day, well without the signature stuff though :lol: . I’ve been told that I have to begin working in one of the stables with the other maintenance guys (so far I’ve been working alone); kind of liked my little caring around job, it’s not that bad once you get used to it.  I hope my new building pig pens job will be quirt good as well when I start again on Monday; there is nothing else to do than to hope for the best!

Well that was all for now guys, I will post again in a month or so when I’m 100% into my new job (hopefully).

Until then take care folks! :)