Adam and I are now in Bundaburg, QLD and staying in a old police station now converted to a hostel called Cellblock Backpackers. We arrived July 1st (woo, Canada Day!) and the next day I had already started work! Bundaburg is a town largely dependent on the surrounding farms so tons of backpackers swarm here to secure they're second year visas or for easy extra work. I'm once again working on a farm!
My first day here I was packing cherry tomatoes . I'm not overly sure what I was expecting but it was something along the lined of this: myself standing beside a huge barrel of ripe, red cherry tomatoes with a container and a quaint scale in front of me for weighing each container. More along the lines of how they would dish out flour at the local store on Little House on the Prairie. Now clearly the method of four delivery has changed since Little House on the Prairie times so I'm not sure why I hadn't thought that tomato packing would be the same. What I met at the farm farm ( and I think factory would be a more appropriate term) was a loud, hungry, cherry tomato-eating machine that gobbled up a whole bin of tomatoes at one end and spat them out the other packaged, weighed and labelled. Since a machine was doing my imagined job I was left with two choices. One was to move the tiny packages from a round rotating table to a crate - god knows why they haven't found a machine that does this, because it seems a lot more simple then weighing and labeling to me. The second option was to sort out those tomatoes that didn't grow perfectly into round, red sellable produce from a conveyor belt as they made their way to the machine. Apparently our customers are not aware that not all tomatoes are the same, and we do not want them to find out! After watching tomatoes spin around all day you start to hallucinate. I for one thought they were beginning to look more like grapes. The two girls I was working with thought of apples, or tiny mangoes. We're both unaware of whether or not this is a healthy hallucination.
Day two I was put on a strawberry farm where we actually do weight out strawberries on a small scale into a container. This farm is smaller and less successful, hence the lack of fancy machinery I suppose. Unfortunately the owner was looking for people to stay through to the end of September... I'm not willing to sacrifice school for strawberries, so I think I'll be moving to another farm this Monday. One other worker who started yesterday with me is also not willing to change her plans for a strawberry so is starting somewhere else Monday as well.
I have to run, so I hope there aren't too many mistakes in here. If so, I'm sure you can figure out what I'm trying to say!
