Everything I Bought In Melbourne! – Try On Mini Haul + Catch Up

by Mia M.

Hello, my beautiful humans – how’s life treating you all today? Good? Fabulous. Let’s swiftly move on from the obligatory me-pretending-to-care-about-your-life portion of this post and skip to the fun bit: me talking about me. Kidding, nobody’s here for that; let’s get onto me talking about clothes.

Well . . . in a sec.

This post is basically an excuse for me to give you an ever-so-brief update about the last few months of my life in Melbourne seeing as I have now left. And also to justify spending money on cute clothing. (I will hopefully give you a more in-depth catch up at some point too, but we’re still waiting for posts about my trip to New York and Toronto and that was all the way back in 2017, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one.)

(This is the – very brief – try on haul. It’s cute, I’d watch.)

So, brief life catch up: after working in a hostel for a month in Bellingen, I travelled with one of the girls I met in said hostel (the lovely Lottie) to a gorgeous little place called Yamba. And after that . . . it was Melbourne bound! Now, for the sake of the story, it’s important for me to be honest here: I literally moved to Melbourne for a tattoo.

The tattoo below to be exact. Isn’t it pretty and delicate and flowery? I have no regrets. Not a single one. But again, sake of the story, that was literally my driving force in heading to Melbourne: I knew I wanted it and the only artist that I wanted to do it was there. So I booked a flight.

Now, I then realised that I needed somewhere to land and that, realistically, it would really help me to have something to do when I got there. A job – or, ideally, a work for accommodation hostel where I could make some friends, score some free rent and earn some cash. What I found was better than that: a demi-pairing position.

For those of you who haven’t heard of au-pairing, it’s essentially a live-in nanny. You get food, accommodation, sometimes transport and (if you’re fulltime) a weekly “pocket money” wage in exchange for baby-sitting, house-cleaning, etc. If you like kids, it’s a really good gig.

Demi-pairing, however, is better. You still get accommodation and food for free – but you only work a few hours a day. For me, I was getting a little girl ready for school and taking her there (literally up the road from our house) – and then I had the whole day and night and weekends free. Which meant I was free to meet the lovely Priya in person (woop woop!) and hang out with her and her gorgeous friends. (As you will remember from my Falls Festival post and my Laneways Festival post.)

Since I had my days free, I ended up getting a job in a charity fundraising office and working as a telephone fundraiser for four months! Honestly, God only knows how I lasted that long . . . but, despite kind of despising the job, I’m glad I did last because it was like having an instant friendship group as soon as I landed in Melbourne. My weekends and nights were all full of fun and excitment – and I made some really good lifelong friends.

In particular, a miss Raven Rain! The lovely Raven is the best friend I picked up in Melbourne, decided I was spending the rest of my life with and so have refused to let go of. As much as I loved Melbourne (and I so dearly did, I am very excited to be going back for a weekend or so next month), having Raven and that genuine, we’ll-be-friends-in-ten-years-not-just-for-the-next-month connection made my time there so much more enjoyable.

Which is precisely why, when we were both kind of getting to the end of our tether with charity fundraising, we ran away to the middle of nowhere together! (Well, with a few of her Canadian friends, whom I also adore.) And so that takes us to now! Not quite sure where I’m going from here . . . But I’ll keep you all (sporadically) updated.

Okay, my loves, that’s this quick life update all done and dusted! I hope some of you actually made it all the way down here. What did you think of my Melbourne purchases? Which of the slightly unnecessary things I bought was your favourite? Let me know your thoughts down below!

Peace,