You can brush up PHP in a week or less. Don't go the waiter/shop assistant route. Just start interviewing for every and any position you see until you get one. Unless you are absolutely broke with zero money. Then take the first job you can, but make sure you take something that allows you time to be able to go for interviews.
Good point. You can't learn Java that fast (at least not well enough to make money at it... that's why they're the highest paid developers... people pay lots for souls.)
Laravel is pretty awesome, I agree. But if you haven't touched PHP in a while then I'd recommend getting familiar with the vanilla language again first. Beacuse who knows what kind of frameworks you may be using in a future gig, but PHP is PHP.
