Work and Holiday Visa

Well, in short, we have them (for Australia). We applied online last night, didn't even submit any paperwork or anything (birth certificate, passport, transcripts, etc). Approved like 2 hours later. Done and done!

Now we can get back and get to work...but not before exploring NZ...

Big Brother Smiles

Kane and I are currently jumping through the numerous and gratuitous hoops to try to transfer our visa to a Work and Holiday Visa, which would allow us to work for a limited time in this country. You may be aware of this situation from previous blog entries, but to summarize, we are currently on a travel visa whereby we cannot work legally. We were expecting to be sponsored by potential employers for a work visa, which has not happened yet. A new visa has just become available to US citizens that allows us to conditionally work in Aus, and that's the visa we're trying to get so that we are more desirable to potential employers. The annoying thing is that we have to be outside of the country when we apply for and when we receive this visa. So for that and other reasons, we are headed to New Zealand.

So, of course, the application process is not very clear on the government website. I therefore fired off an extensive email that I assumed would either be overlooked, not answered in any helpful way, or responded to long after I needed the information. However, to my surprise, I received a very long email from the immigration office this morning. I assumed it would be full of random ramblings that don't really answer my question, but it wasn't. An actual person actually read my email, found the answers to my questions, and typed out intelligible answers in a prompt response. Does any of this sound like government to you? No, me neither. Big brother (and Moe, as pictured) smiles on me today.

Not only that, but the information that the lady sent me was exactly what I wanted to hear. My application is not as complicated as I had originally thought, we don't need to get a bunch of stuff notarized, and the wait time for our visa is typically 48 hours if all goes smoothly. So, unless this lady is yanking my chain and laughing her ass off over it in her cubicle (which I think is justification for a person to be sent to hell in the afterlife), we are hopefully going to be able to get through this and still enjoy our vacation. Add a drop of faith in the government bucket for me.

Workin' It

A couple weeks ago (they use the term "fortnight" here like a normal word, hehe) we went to a sustainable living festival here in Melbourne and stopped by the Engineers Without Borders booth and subsequently joined the group online. Tonight we went to our first EWB meeting in the city along with about 20+ other local members. We met at a downtown bar and fully expected a handfull of middle aged men in suits dryly discussing engineering topics. We were pleasantly surprised to find a mostly younger crowd (our age or a bit older) about half of which were females and who were all very into the multitude of projects, big and small, that the organization orchestrates. They were also a very social group, appearing to be "our kind of people": smart, involved, fun, professional, extremely good looking...you know who I'm talking about.

As an added bonus, we talked to a few people who suggested that we send our resumes their direction to be passed along to interested parties in their respective companies. Frankly, we were hoping for some sort of networking like this to occur, so we're glad that we fit in and got to talk to some nice folks who may have openings at their places of employment. A group of them even invited us to dinner after the meeting, so we shared a nice meal around a lazy susan in Chinatown. All in all, it was a success and we will be contacting the 2 represented companies tomorrow with our resumes.

In other news, our travel visa runs out (i.e. requires us to leave the country and come back in to renew it) on March 15th. We are planning on heading to NZ just before then for a couple weeks to meet our visa requirement and to apply for a different visa that will allow us to work. This temporary work visa was not available when we left the States and it should help us to get work upon our return. We have to apply and receive this stupid visa while outside the country, which is the only tricky part. They say it only takes 2-4 weeks to process, so we're really hoping that they go faster than the US government is known for so that we can come back and get one of these jobs before the fire goes out. I have faith that we will 1) get our foot (feet?) in the door at at least one company, 2) have an awesome NZ vacation, 3) receive our new work visas in a timely fashion while on vacation, 4) come back to a nice job that pays us money. Cross your fingers for us.