Australia Day and Malls

This past Thursday (January 26th) was Australia Day a national holiday celebrating the heritage, aboriginal cultures,  and founding of the country. I made the mistake of celebrating it with hundreds of different people. As someone who is mostly an introvert, that was a mistake...

I love hanging out with crowds. It's my most favorite thing

Douglas caught a good picture of the Harbour Bridge. We took all the back ways because it wasn't so crowded.

Douglas posing with the soldier at The Rocks

Some prints I was able to buy at the festival, I plan on having them framed when I get home. 

Cute kitty friend that lives a few houses down from me. I tried to pet him again today, but he was busy eating dinner. 

A snail friend I spotted on Broadway near CBD

This week has been a bit of a hectic one. I'm starting my first temporary job as a Data Administrator and my recruiter (Jessica, very nice lady) recommended I buy a blazer for my first day on the job. And that I should assume that every temporary job I take will be a very corporate environment, so I must have very corporate attire. Which makes sense, and in hindsight I shouldn't have unpacked my nice blazer from home in order to save weight in my suitcase, but hindsight is 20/20 and I was obviously not thinking about job interviews while packing. For the past few days I've been going to so many different shopping malls looking at every store that sells business attire.

Let's talk about malls. Malls in Australia aren't dissimilar from malls in the US except that most of them have a grocery store inside them and there aren't really many malls with big department stores (i.e. Dillards, Macy's, JC Penney's, etc.). I went to the mall on World Square, I went to the Pitt Street Mall, Westfield Sydney Mall, and a few other small shops and none of the shops had a blazer/jacket that was less than $200. And most of them were dry clean only. I'm already living on a budget and having to pay $6 to wash and dry my clothes, I'm not going to pay extra to dry clean something I'm going to have wear every day.

Finally, I found the Broadway Mall in a town called Ultimo. The heavens opened up and sang as I walked in and found not only a K-Mart, but.... a Target!! It was like walking back into the United States for the brief hour or so that I was there shopping. I was able to find a blazer, a nice skirt, a pretty blouse, and a new pair of shoes all for less than half of what I was going to have to spend at the four other malls I went to.

The emotion of hysteria and pure joy really comes across well in this photo

So. Professional.

Overall, my experience wasn't a bad one. Just makes me miss Capitalistic America. Australia is a capitalistic society, but how capitalized can you be when your McDonald's doesn't even have McGriddles?