Day 267! Today was and wasn’t the most productive day. I didn’t really leave the hostel much today but I did get some work done, which is good! The weather didn’t really put me in the mood to do much outdoors today unfortunately…

I woke up to a much different weather situation today… yesterday was warm and sunny. Today was cold and rainy.

So I decided, I was probably going to spend most of my day indoors.

To start off my day I made myself another round of avocado toast! It wasn’t going to fix the rainy day, but it definitely enhanced my mood for the morning!

I then finally got around to doing my civic duty, voting for the upcoming US presidential election!

I’m glad that even though I’m on the other side of the world I can still make my little impact on this crazy election.

While I was filling out my ballot, Immy woke up and offered me some oats! So I took her up on that for my second breakfast of the morning. Cooked oats and peanut butter was a perfect second meal and I’ll definitely snag some on my next grocery run.

I then went to the TV room to devour more of my book! I’m now over 300 pages in and thoroughly enjoying.

I also spent some time scouring the web for jobs. I need to make the time and go hand out more CVs, that will truly be the way I find a job!

Lunchtime rolled around and I made myself a couple tuna melts with tomatoes. It’s another easy and cheap meal that is very tasty too!

I spent my morning lounging and relaxing… but this afternoon, it was time to work!

But Elie… you haven’t found a job yet?

Well if you thought that, you’d be right. But every now and then I get asked to do some video editing for the engineering firm I used to work for. And almost two weeks ago I was asked to edit a video for them. But with the business of moving to Australia, I’ve neglected it and put it off.

I finally had the time and space to sit down and properly edit the video. So I spent the next couple of hours trimming, editing, and rendering the project. It’s very simple and easy work which is really nice to have every few months. It also makes me happy that I left the company on good terms and they still want to keep me around.

It was really nice editing a video again, it’s one of my favorite hobbies (jobs I guess). I’ll definitely be keeping an eye and ear out for any video editing jobs while in Australia!

I finally wrapped up everything around 6:30pm and I decided it was time to head to the gym! I’m on day 3 of my 7 day trial and I want to make sure to get the most out of it.

So… I finally made my way out into the cold day (thankfully it stopped raining by this point).

I had a really nice pull workout day, which consisted of bicep and back exercises. But my previous days of working out had made me super sore… and I’m sure today’s workout was going to as well.

It’s been really really nice getting back into a gym. I had to take 3 months off while scuba diving because working out doesn’t really mix well when diving as much as I was… it can cause DCS (the bends). But now that I’m done diving for now, I can workout as much as I’d like!

After an hour, I made my way back to the hostel in the cold. By the time I was done showering, I was starved.

I made my last bowl of beef and rice for the week. I’ll need to pop by the grocery store to get a few more things to finish out the week, but it’ll still end up being way cheaper than eating out.

After I finished, I was chomping on some rice cakes with peanut butter when my friend Welmoed told me she had some leftover food that she wasn’t going to eat. She offered it to me since she was leaving the hostel tomorrow and wasn’t going to be able to eat it… and I wasn’t going to let food go to waste!

So for my second dinner, I had raviolis with mushrooms.

While I was eating, I had a really nice conversation with two new Dutch travelers, Chris from England, and Welmoed who’s also from the Netherlands. We chatted about our travels and lots of different life topics from work to having kids. It was a really nice way to spend my dinner and one of the many reasons why I was excited to move back into a hostel!

For the rest of the night, I joined my friends in the TV room and continued binge watching the TV show LOST with them. It’s been years since I watched this show with my childhood friend Evan. So it’s bringing back nice memories!

We lost track of time and it had become late pretty quickly. So we finished off the episode we were on and headed to bed.

I have no plans for tomorrow yet… I’m assuming more reading, working out, and job hunting if I had a guess. But we’ll see what tomorrow holds for us… well… tomorrow!

– Elie