April 12-18 My first doctor's visit

Today I worked at a beautiful café called Higher Ground as a server, and it was hard work (especially with different systems in place for each work) but I loved it. The food is absolutely stunning and so is the venue. I attached some pictures from the internet of it! The pictures don't even do this place justice, it is a sprawling two story cafe that is also open on evenings and for functions. I hope that if all goes well they want me back.

Hotcake at Higher Ground in Melbourne

I also worked at La Di Da tonight. Friday night was wild, I worked from noon until 4 am. This ranges from lunch service to after-work drinks and finally the night club. The night club started off with a $25,000 bar tab which was just craziness! There were strict rules about what drinks we could serve on the bar tab, and naturally, we ran out of glassware because people were just pounding drinks! I am getting the hang of the night club set up a bit more: which rooms we bring the liquor from, where the juices and mixers live and how to store them, where to get the ice from, where the glassware lives instead of plastic for Saturday nights, and a bunch of other things. It is such great exercise working at a bar because you are constantly moving and lifting heavy things! Haven’t had to change a keg so far thankfully! :) The next day, Saturday, I worked from 4 pm – 3 am. this was just as fun. I worked a small hen party (bachelorette party) that hired a burlesque dancer. The music and dancing/costumes were so fun and I definitely want to try a class in the future. After a longgg day and night of work we had knockoff drinks at work and then I went with some coworkers to a night club called Tramp. There was great music and the place was bumping even though we went at like 4 o’clock in the morning. This is so typical for Melbourne though. My nightclub coworkers have friends at Tramp so the connections helped a lot! The next day was a recovery day from a long weekend of work, went grocery shopping and hung out with my friend Lee. He is one of the pastry chef’s at Zumbo and I really want to go there soon to try some of the sweets!

Monday I shopped for new jeans (got some awesome black ones with rips) and then had work to help at a a karaoke event called Take the Mic. I wasn’t sure how it was going to be, and honestly don’t like karaoke that much, but it was an organized event with actually really impressive singers! I was running around serving food and drinks to people that night. It’s been so convenient staying right next to my work. When I get short breaks I can just walk across the street and hang out with friends from the hostel. The hostel has all these fun activities including sangria night, family dinner, movie night, and wine and cheese Wednesday! So they ended up calling me back to work at the café for food running – whoop whoop! I’ll take it.

And nowww for what we’ve all been waiting for, my first spider/bug bite story in Australia. I worked this morning but had to go to the doctor afterwards because I was having this weird reaction to bites on both my feet right above the tongue of the shoe. They were very itchy, with a puncture wound on both feet, and even though I wasn’t itching, they started getting hard and swollen and very hot to the touch. There was basically a baby carrot erupting underneath my skin! So yucky. All jokes aside, being from America, I was scared to get a bug bite like this in Australia, so always better to be safe than sorry and go get it checked out by a doctor. I’ll write a whole post about medicines and travel/medical insurance at some point on this blog, because I think it’s very important for international travel to be prepared for as much as you can. Anyways, the doctor said it was probably a bug bite but didn’t know which kind, and that I should use zyrtec pills (antihistamines) with a cream that had prednisone in it, so basically a steroid cream. Remarkably, after a few days on all of this I was totally fine! A good trick to note for bug bites is to circle them and then see if they get any bigger in size. Is it really a trip abroad if I don’t go to the doctor? Let me know.