Hey friends...I've got no excuses really. All I can say is that inspiration hasn't hit in a while. And it still hasn't hit to be honest. I'm kind of forcing myself to write at the moment because a hell of a lot has happened lately. For one, my New Zealand visa ran out. When we got back from Egypt, I had about two and a half months until I had to leave the country. So Josh and I made our way down to the South Island and spent our last two months in Akaroa, a tiny village in the Banks Peninsula. We lived in the staff house of the waterfront motel we were working at. What kind of work were we doing at the motel, you ask? We were part-time cleaners. Yep, we spent our mornings cleaning dishes, making beds, and scrubbing toilets and shit. I guess that could be part of why I haven't written lately. The embarrassment or whatever. It's been a strange journey that I haven't been ready to own-up to yet. I'm still not, but here we are.
Here's the thing: I'm not rich. Neither is Josh. We barely had any savings when we got to New Zealand. Whatever money we had, we used to buy a car that died on us two months later. And after a couple of months with the fundraising job, we spent TONS on our holiday flights to the UK and Egypt. You may ask, why the hell would anyone travel without having saved up for it? When you travel, wouldn't you want to have the money to stay at fancy hotels, eat at bougie restaurants, and do all the expensive touristy stuff? New Zealand is probably most known for extreme sporting activities like skydiving, bungee jumping, paying to swim with dolphins, etc. Wouldn't it have been better to just work a normal 9to5 job most of the year, then spend two vacation weeks doing a bunch of cool shit? I'm not saying the answer to that is no. It's just a no for me.
I like my travelling lifestyle. I'd rather live in a new country for about a year and see everything it has to offer instead of trying to pack all the major tourist attractions into 14 days...That's my personal preference. And part of being able to live abroad for that long is doing not-so-glamorous jobs sometimes. Working at that motel gave Josh and I two of the most relaxed months we had New Zealand. We only worked until 2pm five or six days a week, we lived on the waterfront, Josh was able to go kayaking whenever he wanted...it was perfect. Scrubbing toilets was worth it if it meant we could live like kings after 2pm. But that job definitely had a shelf life. If we would have tried to do it for more than 2 months, we would have lost our shit.
But now, that chapter is over, and we're in Melbourne. The beach here is just as gorgeous, but we're not interested in living near it this time. We want to be in the heart of the city for at least six months because everyone says city-life is definitely the best Melbourne has to offer. And there's no way in hell I'm scrubbing toilets for six months if I don't have a view like this one.
So while I'm here, I want to try to find joy in work again. I desperately want to go back to design, I really do. But with a year out of the game and a sad excuse for a portfolio, it's not happening anytime soon. The plan for now is to get a part-time job. Maybe as a waitress or, god forbid, even a nanny... Whatever I end up landing, I definitely need it to be part-time so that I could FINALLY start going to the gym (Akaroa didn't have a gym... I know, what the fuck), and also, have time to work on my portfolio. I obviously don't have any new projects to add, but all the projects I do have need TONS of work. Once I started re-designing the layout of my spreads, I realized I probably do have some content to add from my year in New Zealand. One of my old professors would always tell me to put more of myself in my portfolio. Even though my photography level is very amateur, it's still visual content that shows some editing skills. It also shows more of my personality; how I see the world and my passion for travel.
I don't know, it's probably a stupid idea to add very average photography to an architecture portfolio, but when the idea came to me, I was kind of excited to work on the damn thing. I don't think I've been excited about my portfolio since the first draft I made right before my summer internship. That was 3 years ago. Since then I've just been lazily adding final-presentations of projects with minimal thought to layout design, sketches, overall uniformity...pretty much anything that makes a portfolio look good. And now that I've got this spark of inspiration, I'm not letting it die out. I'm gonna do my best to follow through with this commitment. But first, I need to find a goddamn job.
