Chapter 7

Chapter 7

A heavy engine sound, woooong, rang in my eardrums.

Inside a JAL passenger plane crossing the sky over the Pacific.

In the next seat a young woman, eye mask on, was deep asleep, dead to the world.

Stretching lightly, I got up and glanced around the cabin.

'All young faces.'

I had definitely changed planes in Japan, and yet the people gathered are all young Koreans.

From the clothes they wear, the Australian guidebooks they are reading, unmistakable working-holiday hopefuls.

Probably the agencies, linked with the airline, had rented seats in whole blocks and were carrying working-holiday people all at once.

I sat again and took out the notebook and opened it.

[Balance 92 million won]

An amount a little short of about 110,000 AUD.

I had made more than double, but it is still a stock that rises much more.

The fund manager at Gwangju Chohung Bank, who had treated me like a god of investment, had looked at me like a lunatic when I said I was disposing of the stock.

But what I needed now was seed money.

I put this in a Korea Exchange Bank account, submitted the proof documents too, set it so I could pull the money anytime, and left Korea.

This side I am a bit of a specialist in, so preparing was not hard.

For now there is a place to stay that the agency set, and they say a job, getting a forklift certificate, is not hard.

Other certificates I can take slowly as I go.

I wrote a resume carefully in English and saved it in advance too.

Looking at the notebook like that, checking I had not missed anything, I firmed the early plan in Sydney once more.

A few hours later, with the announcement, the plane landed on the runway at Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport.

Getting off the plane, I followed the crowd toward immigration.

Honestly, I was a little tense.

When I came to Australia in the previous life I had entered easily on a tourist visa, but now the situation was different.

Surely I would not fail to understand the English, or have a problem with the documents and be called away?

"Next."

At the white officer's blunt call I held out my passport with a tense face.

The officer looked back and forth between my face and the visa in the passport, tapped something on the computer, and without a single extra question stamped it, bang!

"······?"

I had passed.

"Huh... is this all?"

At the process, too bland and over in an instant, I got my passport back with a bewildered face and came out the gate.

A first entry onto Australian soil, empty enough to be embarrassing how cowed I had been.

After snatching the heavy 20-kilogram large suitcase off the baggage belt, I walked out to the arrivals hall.

"Excuse me! Those from AA Study Abroad, come this way!"

In front of the gate, people with placards swarmed.

In the middle of that, a Korean man with a mop of hair, hoodie thrown on roughly, stood with one leg cocked, holding a sheet of A4.

On the paper was a familiar name scrawled in marker.

[Frontier Study Abroad. Han Jeong-su and 7 others]

"I'm Han Jeong-su."

"Ah, yes. Hello. Please wait a moment. When everyone on the list is here, we'll leave."

The mop-haired man nodded roughly and checked the list without sincerity.

Before long, people who had come on the same plane gathered one by one, dragging suitcases.

Four men, four women.

When all eight working-holiday cohort members were gathered, the man guided us to the parking lot outside the airport.

There an old van that could load a lot of luggage was waiting.

"Load the bags in the back and sit anywhere. About thirty minutes to the lodging."

Among the eight working-holiday people packed tight in the narrow van, an awkward silence flowed.

Everyone looked flushed, excitement and fear of a strange continent crossing.

I exchanged a short eye-greeting with the person beside me and turned my head to the window.

As the van left the airport and got on the highway, the huge city of the southern hemisphere began to show its grand face.

'So this is Sydney.'

Under a wide blue sky clearly different from Korea, red-roofed houses spread without end, and rough, crude buildings.

The feeling was strange.

If the Gold Coast had felt like a leisurely seaside village full of palms, here it really felt like an overseas cityscape.

"Look at that."

When the person beside me shouted, far off the heavy steel structure of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House came into view.

In that moment my heart surged hot once more.

'Now it begins.'

The heart I had thought hardened only now began to beat, answering adventure and challenge.

* * *

Where the van stopped was in front of a decent high-rise mixed-use tower rising in the center of Sydney, the CBD.

"Ooh······."

A cry broke from the mouths of the young working-holiday people getting out of the car.

A refined glass exterior and a luxurious lobby laid in marble.

I too thought inwardly that the agency was worth the money, and got on the elevator dragging the 20-kilogram suitcase.

Where the mop-haired man guided us was a corner room on the twelfth floor.

The man took a key from his pocket and opened the front door wide.

"Right, everyone come in. Take your shoes off, put them in that bag, and set them beside your own spot."

The moment we checked the inside, the faces of the people who had been fluttering hardened stiff in an instant.

I too, looking at the scene, was dumbfounded.

Live in a place like this?

This is not a house, it is a chicken coop?

In the living room, where there should have been a wide sofa and a TV, mattresses were laid, and in the room two steel bunk beds were visible.

Even the dining space had a mattress, and for personal privacy there was only a scrap of thin cloth, or a drying rack hung with clothes, standing in for a temporary partition.

And the air in the house...

Ventilation not working properly, a sour smell from towels not fully dry, the smell of ramen soup soaked into the wallpaper, and the stale, heavy air of several people's body odor mixed, stabbing the lungs.

In the room, two working-holiday people who had settled first were eating ramen with tired faces.

They glanced at the eight newcomers who had swarmed in, then soon pulled their eyes away, indifferent.

'Well... this is a problem.'

"Right, set the bags down. I'll assign spots. The master room already has earlier guests, so it would be better for two of the men to go in rather than the women. Women, take spots in the living room, and Mr. Park Dong-myeong sleeps on the mattress in front of the dining area. And Mr. Han Jeong-su."

The man assigning spots, flicking a finger indifferently like a warden of a camp, called me.

"Yes?"

He indicated past the living room with his chin and said.

"Mr. Jeong-su, you use the outdoor veranda over there."

"······The veranda?"

I walked slowly to where the man pointed.

Opening the glass sliding door of the living room and going out, a veranda came into view with Sydney in one look.

Truly, literally, that veranda where you hang laundry and put the washing machine.

There they had blocked it with a mattress and scraps of cloth and made a room.

'Tsk.'

I clicked my tongue small.

A prefab structure like this, however well you block it, outside wind has to come in.

The weather is cool now, but it meant it would get cold when winter came.

'Nice words, sunroom or balcony, this is no different from sleeping outdoors.'

"If wind comes in, fasten that plastic a bit tight. Anyway it's only a place to sleep, so you'll adapt soon. No complaints, right?"

When the mop-haired man asked listlessly, the other working-holiday people looked at me with pitying eyes.

'Unbelievable.'

I burst a short laugh.

And silently I dragged the suitcase out to the veranda and began unpacking.

"The view alone is going to be incredible."

"Haha. Welcome to Australia."

Damn.

"Heh heh."

The man, having finished his work, said as he left.

"Rest today, and tomorrow at nine there is an orientation at the agency. You have to come, because there you set up how to make an account, how to find your way around, a debit card, and a tax file number."

He disappeared, and I laid the suitcase down and perched on the mattress.

It smelled a bit musty, and the foam was sunk, but it was bearable.

I decided to think of it as the price traded for the sight beyond the window, the brilliant skyline of central Sydney and the dazzling forest of buildings spread like a picture.

I burst a dry laugh.

In the previous life I had slept in a prefab like corrugated board beside a site canteen, and there had been days I dozed by a fire in a drum on a construction site in midwinter.

Next to that, a veranda like this was almost romantic.

'Once I grab a spot, I leave right away.'

Anyway this place is somewhere they support for early settlement.

Once the setup is done, leave without regret and that is that.

I lay back on the mattress set on the cold tile floor and drew in long the Australian wind coming through the plastic tarp.

'Heart, stop showing off.'

I grabbed the heart that was pounding despite me, and sought sleep.

* * *

Morning was hell, literally.

Ten residents in one two-room apartment.

And men and women in their twenties, in their prime, mixed in one house, sleeping together.

There, bathrooms: the master room and the living room, two in all.

The morning hour when everyone opens their eyes was a battlefield of flying blood, nothing else.

Bang bang bang!

"Excuse me! Are you sleeping in there? I'm really urgent!"

"Ah, one moment! Just rinsing my hair!"

In front of the bathroom the sound of legs crossed, feet stamping, did not stop.

On the master-room side, sharp voices went back and forth about the shower taking too long.

A twenty-year-old girl who looked as if she had eaten warm rice her parents prepared and grown up nicely, whether this sight was a shock, waited until she could not and even sniffled and cried.

"Hic······ what is this. Why is the house like this, really······ I want to go to Korea······."

In the middle of the pandemonium, I perched at ease on my outdoor mattress set up on the veranda and sipped the instant coffee I had brought.

The only winner of this suffocating bathroom war was me.

Whether thanks to the body-clock alarm of army life, the water not yet drained, at five-thirty in the dawn, while others were dead asleep, worn out with fatigue.

Without a reveille, I got up first, hummed, finished a leisurely shower in hot water, and completed preparations to go out perfectly.

'As expected, the bird that wakes early finds the food.'

Watching the greenhorns fighting a wretched toilet war in the chicken-coop living room, I smiled quietly.

The morning that had been like a war passed, and the dazed new working-holiday people, led by the mop-haired manager, headed for the agency's local Sydney branch.

A fourth-floor office in a building in central Sydney, not far from the lodging.

A place made like a big PC bang or a reading room, that was the agency's local branch.

Sitting packed at the table, a branch manager in his mid-thirties, shirt dressed neatly, stood in front.

"Right, did everyone get through the first morning in Sydney safely? From now, for about three hours, we will run the early-settlement orientation for you to work legally in Australia for a year and survive."

With the branch manager's skilled conduct, the orientation proper went on.

"First we will fill the document forms handed out. To make money in a tax job in Australia, you absolutely need a tax number to register with the tax office, a TFN."

People holding the English form had a look of being at a loss once more.

After the bathroom war, hit with the combo of English documents, they only blinked.

"Excuse me, do I write a Korean address? The spelling, how······."

"If you look at the back there will be one more sheet written as an example. Look at what is there and write it the same. The address is set as this agency's address, and for mail you come to the agency and pick it up."

The local agency even played postman.

While groans came from here and there, I held a pen and filled the blanks without hesitation.

Writing documents like this in the English I had studied in the army, there was no block.

The problem was conversation with locals.

In under five minutes I set the documents down and folded my arms, and the branch manager scanned my documents with surprised eyes and nodded.

Next we had to fill account-opening documents for Commonwealth Bank, one of the Australian banks.

"From the account opening until the card comes by mail usually takes about a week. If you find a pay job it may not matter, but if you find a casual job or a full-time job you will definitely need this account. Of course you need it for daily life too. For anyone who does not know, I will add an explanation. In Australia, to open an account you have to go through an identity system called the 100-point check. There, passport, driver's license, and utility bill are each scored, and you have to pass to open an account. But by a special rule, working-holiday people can open an account with only a passport for exactly six weeks after entry. So if you do not open it now, it can be a headache later."

At that, people who had had no will began filling the documents with effort.

Watching that, the man laughed.

Probably he had seen a scene like this often.

"Next is the phone. Go out on the street and buy a prepaid SIM at Optus or Vodafone. Buy a machine, a used Nokia."

And he held up his own phone.

A crude blue brick phone with nothing you could call design.

Last, the branch manager wrote numbers large on the whiteboard.

[Monthly $3,000 ~ $4,000]

"Right, everyone came to Australia to make this money, yes? Even if you cannot say a word of English, places you can work right now are everywhere. Tomato farms on the Queensland side, grape farms in Mildura, or a meat plant on the outskirts. Do you know how much the hourly wage is? Minimum is 12 dollars, and most give 15, 16 dollars an hour. Work a convenience-store part-time in Korea and the hourly wage is about 2,000 won, right? Here you can make 150,000 won a day."

The branch manager spoke in a flowing stream.

And strangely, vitality began to bloom fresh on the bodies of the working-holiday people who had been rotting.

'What?'

The branch manager had cast tremendous magic.

Fire lit in the eyes of the greenhorns who had been long-faced all morning.

A rosy fantasy that pick some fruit on a country farm, cut meat a few times at a plant, and millions of won a month would stick in.

They were already fluttering as if they had become rich, whispering to each other.

But I, chin propped, burst a dry laugh inwardly.

'Naive bastards. Do they think eating other people's money is easy.'

Still, the mood of the lodging was so bad that something like this was needed.

"Anyone who needs a job, go to the bulletin board at the front door and there is a lot of job information posted, so check it. Or go on the internet and check the Australia-country job board. And be careful of Korean contractors. There are many bad ones. If you need it, come to me. I will give you farm-contractor numbers."

"..."

Is that simple goodwill?

Or is it saying there are that many swindlers in Australia?

Anyway, with the branch manager's line, the orientation of three hours came to an end.

"Right. Then let's go straight to the bank and make accounts."

I quietly followed behind.

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