Broken but VERY Happy

So we have been working on the same farm for the past week. It has been hard work, sometimes back-breaking (the planting) and sometimes quite repetitive (the trimming), but we managed to negotiate our pay with farmer Frank, YAY!!! Planting, flower processing and other various jobs are paid by the hour and when we are bunch trimming the vines we are paid by the vine. We negotiated 70 cent per vine, some people are being paid 30 and 50 cent on other farms. We’d average about 200 vines a day each right now, and we’ll hopefully get faster, which isn’t half bad. We usually work from about 7am until about 2 or 3 depending on what work we are doing. It beats a bar or office job any day – well that’s just my opinion, I like working outdoors.

One Big Family has also grown bigger. We now have about 40 residents - more Germans, English and Irish. There’s even a girl from Portmarnock that knows a lot of people we know from home.

Our rent here is $130 a week each, plus we pay another $30 for our bus to and from work. It’s a fairly good deal, we LOVE this place! It definitely beats Melbourne right now. THIS is what I imagined Australia to be like. Hopefully we will all be able to save money, once we don’t drink it all, ha! There’s always a session going on out the back garden.

We spent our second Saturday here working on the same farm, but this time we were processing their flowers. They grow beautiful Lilies which they sell on to florists or fill orders for weddings. We got to work for 6am and picked about 1000 lilies between us all morning. We then put them through a machine that sorted them by length. The final job was to bunch them by colour and size. It was actually a brilliant day, we really enjoyed it. Eimear said she now realizes why flowers are so expensive, because so much goes into the process before they hit the shops. In the morning the boys got us McDonalds for breakfast, coffees and biscuits throughout the day and then nice cold cokes to finish us off for the day. There were lots of orange trees around so we picked a huge bucket to bring back home, Aine and Liv were very excited about picking our own fruit. We finished about 2.30 and Larry’s cousin Larz picked us up in the bus to bring us home. It’s Saturday, which means FREE BBQ and a huge party!!! The best decision we ever made was to get on that night bus to Merbein!!! Larry and One Big Family – we love you!!!