I find a job

Canberra Hotel Brisbane 

In the morning we’re starving. We make our way to the breakfast room around 9 o’clock and look around. There are a few people eating bacon, eggs, sausages, baked beans and burnt bread. The coffee looks disgusting. We don’t believe it. Why aren't these people civilised? Where are the croissants, where is the cheese, and where is the proper bread? Where have we come to?

A waitress comes and asks us what we want. Neither of us speaks much English so we look around for the least disgusting food, which looks like this burn bread and we point to it at the next table. She gets the message and brings us toast, butter and marmalade and tea.

'Why can’t they have proper bread' Ben asks, 'Why can’t they have proper butter', I reply, 'this stuff has fallen into the ocean, It tastes salty. And fancy eating eggs and sausages and baked beans for breakfast. Bloody hell, what sort of a place is this?

McDonnell and East - George Street

After breakfast, we wander down George Street, I need fags, I ran out last night. There’s a kiosk next to the Canberra Hotel and I ask for Peter Styvesant cigarettes but the bloke at the Kiosk doesn’t understand what I am saying. Ben is trying but no luck the bloke just looks at me mumbling something I don’t understand. There is a display box on the counter with Galaxy cigarettes in it. I take a packet of Galaxy and give him some money. He gives me the change and it looks from now, until I can speak English, I will have to smoke Galaxy because understand me when I say it.

Charlie Tschudin is a nice old chap and gives us coffee and cake and asks us where in Switzerland we are from and what sort of work we are looking for. I tell him I’m an electrician. Oh, he says I know an electrician who runs the electrical shop at Carrier Air Conditioning, I’ll give him a call and with that, he disappears into his office. When he comes back he says this chap’s name is Urs Deutsch and he is looking for electricians and he wants to see you right away.

Charlie calls me a cab and tells the driver to take me to Carrier Air Conditioning in Woolloongabba. Ben is staying back in his Coffee shop.

Urs is pleased to meet me and after a short chat which, he insists, we conduct in English, well, he talks English, I talk in Swiss-German. He tells me he prefers Swiss electricians and asks me 'When can you start'? I tell him, we have just arrived in Brisbane and are living in the Canberra Hotel and we need permanent accommodation. He wants me to start on Monday Morning at 8 o’clock. I have to agree. Of course I call him Mister Deutsch but he keeps insisting I call him by his first name, Urs. I am uncomfortable with that, but when he keeps insisting, I reluctantly address him by his Christian name. 

  

  He is from Winterthur and tells me about his jobs in Australia since his arrival a couple of years previously. We agree I would be there on Monday morning and we finish the conversation.

 He calls me another cab and tells the cabby to take me back to McDonnell and East where Ben is waiting with Charlie. I’m very excited. I have a job, with a Swiss bloke no less, he’ll look after me I know.