Back (home)

Its been a while since the last update and since then, I've gone back home to Singapore for 1.5 weeks to attend a dear friend's wedding and now I'm back in Melbourne. The trip back home gave me an opportunity to reconnect with friends, ex-colleagues and very importantly, food back home. One of the main issues I have here is the general lack of social life compared to back home in Singapore. It's difficult to maintain any sort of friendship when you are only at a place for a few months at a time. And even with our plan to be based here in Melbourne for a longer term, it is only for 6 months. Perhaps if I was here alone, it might probably have been easier since I would generally have more time on my hands I would probably be living in a shared house with more space and time for social interactions. Travelling alone would also mean there is less of a need to answer to anyone for the way you spend your time. Of course travelling with a companion has its own perks as well and in a sense I'm glad I had the opportunity to travel alone for extended periods of time in my 20s and now travelling with a companion living through the best of both experiences.

Being back in Melbourne also means I get to go back to work - work I have to do to sustain the lifestyle I want to be leading. So while my colleagues back home begin their holidays, I restart my work. In my last post I mentioned the weather as being quite detrimental to the hours that I can work. Coming back, I soon realise that the hours are not any better. On hindsight, my 'holiday' back home came as an opportune time as I literally found out yesterday that most of the workers there had gone 6-8 days without work while I was back home - so I guess I did not miss out on too many hours. Even after coming back, the hours aren't great - for the past 2 days, I have done a grand total of 8h work. You would think that is something that many would be happy about but being paid by the hour means this lack of hours would result in certain financial concerns. No worries though, we are still in a good financial state and even if this were to continue through to the end of my PDL, we would still be financially ok. Reading the news yesterday made me realise that this issue is not limited to cherries. Other fruits like the melons are also facing this issue. (Sidenote: it is quite refreshing to read in the Australian news about how various seasonal fruits are coming along once in a while and how they are being priced at the various supermarkets). Here's an article from ABC news about seasonal fruits/food. Supposedly due to the high amount of rainfall, it has lead to the plants/ trees being waterlogged and therefore producing poor quality fruits (many of which would have to be disposed of) and thus the lack of fruits to be processed which translate to higher prices for consumers.

One of the main things I do at work is to sort out cherries. Similar to the strawberry farm in Perth, a good percentage of cherries we see never end up being seen/ eaten by consumers. 

Here's something that was given to us on our first day to help us with the cherry sorting. While you would imagine that there would be someone to run through this with you, that wasn't the case on my first day. I was thrown straight into the sorting station with the instruction to 'throw out what you wouldn't eat' and 'put it in the 2nd grade if its not perfect'. Going back home and looking through this list made me realise I have poor standards (hahaha) and I was not sorting out enough 2nd grade from 1st grade cherries. I think I've mentioned this before earlier while I was working at the strawberry farm - we talk about food sustainability in Singapore and how 'ugly food' has become a big thing in Singapore but for true sustainability, I think we need to look further up the supply chain and try to 'save' some of these 'uglier food'. By the time it reaches the supermarkets, a lot of it would have been removed from the supply chain - and boy, supermarkets do actually have pretty high standards. They do reject batches that do not actually meet their level of quality. This is consistent both here at the cherry farm and in Perth at the strawberry farm.

We had some executives from Woolies come into our facility yesterday. Word got around pretty quickly of the situation. It was almost like a lesson obs. The bosses were jumpy, reminding us over and over again to always do a proper quality check.  And so we put on a show for them. Everyone seemed to look busy - the supervisors helping out and constantly checking on the various bags of cherries when usually a number of them simply walked up and down the aisle observing our work. One of the executives smiled at me while I was packing the cherries into boxes, I smiled back like the happy worker I was. The timing of the tour was also interesting. It started at around 0945 until around 1045 coinciding with our 15 minute breakfrom 1015 to 1030. Not sure if it is coincidental but it was almost as if to show them that look, we do take care of our workers.

We have also started looking into what we can do after our lease ends next March. One of the things we intend to do is to take a 12h ferry across to Tasmania with Abby and do a 2-3 week road trip down there hopefully catching the Southern lights. A preliminary search of the fares put it at around 800AUD for a return trip for both of us + Abby which isn't too bad considering how much it might take to rent a car/4WD there + all the camping equipment we would probably need. One concern would be how stable the ferry was going to be. I've seen Youtube videos of vehicles bouncing about on the ferry like ice cubes in a cocktail shaker when the seas are very choppy. And we have no insurance on the car (other than 3rd party). Worst case scenario (ignoring THE worst case scenario) we land in Tasmania without the car which would be devastating. So this is something we gotta sit on a bit more - but not for too long because once the tickets are gone, they are gone, and we won't be able to go to Tasmania at all with Abby. The car fare is sold out up until mid-Feb so this is a decision we gotta make soon.