June 6, 2010

I've been in Thredbo for almost a week now. I spent my last few days in Sydney hanging out with the roommates and watching some NRL. Fun stuff. I left Monday afternoon from Syd. I woke up around 8am and it was POURING down rain. I wish I looked out the window because it sounded like someone was dumping buckets from the sky. I was mortified that I was going to have to cart my luggage to the train station in that kind of weather, but luckily when I woke up it had stopped. I had to take a bus, train, bus, and car. I think I left Sydney at noon and got to the room at 8pm! Awesome. Unfortunately it was dark by the time I got to town so I couldn't see anything.I'll be working between a hotel and vacation apartments and am staying at the hotel. There's an apartment in the basement around back with 4 bedrooms. It's really small, a little bigger than MB and sleeps 10 people. I'm pretty early for the season, so there was only one other person here when I got here, Angel. He's from the Gold Coast and has worked here for 5-6 winters so he's familiar with the area and the people. The next morning I helped Angel clean a room, got a tour of the apartments (where there aren't any guests, only people that live in some of the units), and then he showed me around town. There's no snow yet and the winter season doesn't officially start until this weekend so the whole town is dead. Town is crazy small. MAYBE one "block" length of shops. There's one main road with said shops, mostly touristy places selling gear, cafes restaurants, and hotels. I think I got the full tour of town and the mountain in twenty minutes. It's a beautiful town. It looks like most of it was built right around the same time and it all looks like similar architecture, which is cute. I can't wait to see it in the snow. Snow makes everything look so beautiful! The next day, Wednesday, I started training at reception. It's pretty simple, but there are a lot of dates and prices to remember, so that'll just take time. After a short time of training Scot left me alone to play around. Since it's not officially winter and there isn't any snow, we don't get much activity. Friday night we went out to the pub. I don't remember the name of it, but there were pool tables and a lot of locals. Angel knows pretty much everyone so I had no trouble making friends. All were over 40, but good guys. I decided that this was the perfect place to learn to like beer. I'm not a fan, but I managed. My footy team was playing so we watched half of it at the one bar and left to another for the rest. The second bar was much smaller, like really small. One room, 3-4 tables and one employee. I liked it. There weren't many people there either. A few of the guys from the last place came over so we all became friends. Angel was pretty drunk and I was tired so I started walking back but he wanted to go out again. I left him and went back and he was shortly behind. We ate some food and called it a night. Saturday was spent watching movies and doing nothing. Sunday I figured we could go for a walk. We woke up with a little bit of snow at the top of the mountain and it was a little rainy, but I figured after a full day inside we needed outside time. We got our season passes and walked a bit loop through town. From the main road there are two roads to get to Thredbo, we walked a full loop. It was nice.