There’s this small café on a corner right by the train station. It makes the best skinny cappacinos in Fremantle and the chocolate chip – blueberry muffins are the perfect treat to cheer anyone up. One entire wall is a red chalkboard, covered with last-minute quotes, wise words, “call me”, different initials sketched together with hearts, and a spattering of foreign phrases. The entire wall facing out towards the train station and the harbor is completely glass, giving you a feeling of sitting outside and letting you people watch or enjoy the company of the other coffee drinkers who are plopped down with notepads or computers. There are numerous palm trees and the sky is a bright blue. I can see the parking spot where Chris parked our Apollo Campervan the first day we arrived here. That day was full of relief, excitement, and the fresh feeling of putting your feet down in a new spot. Little did we know it was the start of a very different part to our Australian adventure. Some parts good, some parts harder than expected, and simply put... a lot to overcome. But if something doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. Right?
To me, this small town where everything closes at 5 tastes like baked beans, Emu Bitter, pizza, and granola bars. It smells like garlic, coffee, fire, and whatever strange musty odor that perpetually resides in my room. Here, life is simple. I work six days a week at a small Italian restaurant called “PortaRosa”. I work there with two of my best friends in WA, Minnie and Isabelle. If I’m not working I’m either at the library, in my room, or trying to finagle my way around Perth city. Hospitality work is getting incredibly old at this point and my new job is a huge shift from the chaotic mess at Beachcombers that I loved. Instead of 70 staff, there’s about 8… instead of 12-hour shifts with 20-minute breaks, my shifts are usually between 3 – 7 hours and if I have a break it’s for 2 hours. The people I work with are great, most of them being from Italy and teach me some phrases here and there. I’m lucky enough to get a pizza slipped in my bag from time-to-time and the kitchen lets me nibble on the cucumbers and bread whenever I want. Even as I’m sitting here, I’m wearing nothing but black (besides a pink flower in my hair that was a present from my Mom) and I’m counting down the hours until the night shift begins. I love the spontaneity of waitressing, getting to meet new people each day, and talk to individuals from all over the world. This job constantly reminds me of how small the world is... but after Australia, I hope to never have to do this again. Bring on big girl jobs where my clothes don't smell like garlic bread and chili mussels at the end of the night!
The best part about living in Fremantle is that we’ve come to acquire a fantastic new group of friends! We've become somewhat of a makeshift family and see each other almost every day. It’s weird because never in my life have I hung out with mostly couples… but now, it’s almost completely what our group consists of. Different, but definitely not worse. We met up with Edgar and Minnie who are two of the most fantastic people I know. Hailing from Mexico, I worked with both of them at Beachcombers and as soon as we got to Freo they introduced us to Isabelle and Roy. The two couples met on the road somewhere between Melbourne and Perth and decided to travel the rest of the journey together. They are from Amsterdam and are amazing. It’s not uncommon for us to get up and find Roy sleeping on our couch due to Isabelle having to work super early and then having a bbq with them later on. Through Isabelle and Roy we met Nick and Linda from Germany. Both of these couples having traveled throughout Australia in campervans so they met while sleeping down at South Beach one night. Nick has been traveling around the world for the past year and is hilarious – every cool place he’s gone he does this “crab walk” on his video camera and so far has made an awesome youtube video of it. From places like NYC, Sydney, the beaches of Fiji... it’s something really cool and just funny to look back on. Linda is still in school back in Germany so she’s only been able to see Nick sporadically. They’ll be separating again pretty soon which is incredibly sad, but gives you a good feeling that there are still those people who try that hard. One night, I was walking home from work with Minnie when we were yanked into Edgar’s campervan by Edgar and Josh and brought out to the harbor to drink some beers and hang out with Clemente and Solene (vive la france!) who they had just met at the hostel. Immediately I knew that we all were going to hang out for a while… they were just so NICE and sweet and funny. The next day I ended up talking to Selene for what seemed like a couple minutes but was actually over an hour about everything from getting married to friends at home. I still can’t get over how easily it is to connect to people despite their nationality, background, or age. Throw in our American couple that we live with (Ayden and Justine) and we have our amazing band of misfits. At least every other day we have a bbq at our place with lots of odds and ends of food that we all pick up and a couple drinks if we have a couple spare dollars. Josh, Patty, and I have it pretty lucky when it comes to company. I can’t imagine Freo without any of these people. But unfortunately we’ve already started saying our good-byes. Minnie left for Broome a couple days ago, Edgar just sold his van and will be headed to Asis next week, Nick and Linda are back on the road come Monday, and Ayden and Justine are off exploring on Sunday. On the bright side, Isabelle and Roy will be moving in and although our group will shrink a bit, we’ll still be having cookouts and poker nights with Isabelle, Roy, Patty, Josh, Clemente, Solene, and myself. Plus, hopefully we won’t stop meeting people and recruit more people for our late night talks and massive feasts. Some friends from Sweden are supposed to be arriving this weekend, we have one little Irish girl from Beachcombers in Perth City, and a German friend who I saw on the street but haven’t been able to convince to make the trek all the way to Hilton for some of our famous dinners yet. Soon though, soon.
So what is WA all about? As Patty says, it stands for Waiting Always. We’ve been waiting to find jobs (which we did), waiting to find a house (did that too), find some crazy kids to call our friends (yup), waiting to see if Chris was going to leave (unfortunately, he did), waiting to save up money to get out of here (booked the flight yesterday!), waiting for work to be over… beers to be cracked… steaks on the grill… poker being dealt… and the good parts of all this to continue. Waiting Always.
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