Busy Weekend

Monday, November 23, 2009

It’s Monday morning here. I’ve decided that we need to take a day or two off each week from writing the blog. It will probably be Sunday and Monday here as most of you who are reading are back in the states. That’ll make it the weekend for you. So we’ll start that this week.

Looking at the TV schedule this morning I see that the Broncos are playing on TV here at 3:45. I’m going to try and be around for that. I’m missing football a little. Don’t get me wrong, Cricket has just started its regular season last night, but I do miss American sports. (Aussies seem to like basketball the best of American sport. It’s not really my fave.)

We started our weekend on Saturday morning by biking over to Southbank, an area just the other side of the river from CBD. Southbank is where the state library of Queensland is, along with the Queensland Museum, Maritime museum, and the art museum. There is a really big park there dominated by a man-made beach/swimming area called Streets Beach. It’s really lovely, a nice lagoon area that’s free to swim in. Around the beach there are a bunch of restaurants and shops. They also have a market on the weekends where people sell their crafts. We spent an hour or so browsing and then grabbed some lunch at an outdoor café.

We took the opportunity to drink a jug (Aussie for Pitcher) of Victoria Bitter (VB). VB is the state beer of Victoria. It tastes a little like Heineken, only not as skunky. It was good and cold and we both managed our first little buzz in Oz. We ate a nice lunch of fish and chips and set back off to explore.

We walked up and down a really nice footpath and took a few pictures. We also popped in the library and used the WIFI there. (We’ve decided to sort the home internet and phones out this morning, enough is enough) We spent about a half an hour exploring the Queensland Museum, reading about the history and culture of Queensland. We’ve picked an interesting state to live in. Did you know that macadamia nuts are native to Australia? They were found wild in a small part of Queensland then planted in Hawaii where the industry took off. I always thought they were 100% Hawaiian.

After walking several miles, our feet hurt and we biked back home. The bike ride was only about four miles one-way, and it only took us fifteen minutes or so. We’re both excited that it’s so close. We plan on spending a lot of time there.

On the way home we stopped off at Coles for some groceries for dinner. The shops close at five or five thirty every day, so you need to get any shopping done early. We made some turkey burgers and a salad for dinner. Leah was relieved to find ground turkey in the market.

The next morning, Sunday, we set off to the beach. We’ve been here for almost two weeks and hadn’t seen it. That is unacceptable. We grabbed a train to the Gold Coast, an area of long white beaches and huge hotels just south of Brisbane. We had an appointment to meet a girl from the states who just finished the OT program that Leah is about to start. The train ride was about an hour and the bus was another twenty minutes. We’re told that you can drive there in under an hour, but we didn’t find it inconvenient at all.

We got to Broad Beach at about 10:30 and weren’t set to meet Beth until 12:00 so we took some time to check out the beach. It’s beautiful, long and white, just what a beach should be. The water was colder than I expected, but it felt great on a hot day. There were surfers everywhere. We found out that this week is called Schoolies here. It’s sort of like spring break (SPRNNNG BREK, that’s for you Katie) in Florida. Schoolies week sees thousands of year twelve seniors celebrating the end of school by going to the gold coast and getting wasted. The news is full of stories about how your kids are getting high and having sex while you’re none the wiser. It’s pretty funny to us. We were only annoyed by them when a couple of drunken teenagers on the bus were acting like retards. They almost got in a fight with a rather large Asian.

We met Beth at about noon and grabbed some lunch. Leah and Beth hit it off really well. They had been e-mailing with each other for over a year. She had lots of great information about the program and what it’s like to live here while in school. Leah feels a lot more confident about the program after talking with Beth for a while. Leah’s taking a pretty huge leap here with almost no help. She’s been really brave so far, but I can tell she’s much more at ease now. She’ll do great.

We ate lunch and had a couple of beers and talked with Beth for almost three hours. Afterwards we said goodbye (Beth is going back to the states in December) and went back to the beach. Too bad Beth is leaving because Leah and her would be great friends, you could just tell. They had a ton in common. Leah read her Kindle (world’s best gift) and I snoozed in the sand. There’s something about the sound of waves, I can sleep like a baby on a beach.

Leah here…by the way, while we were eating lunch there was a guy dressed in white linen pants and an electric blue shirt with, oh no he didddn’t, a microphone. He was belting out the funniest songs in a Robert Goullet (sp?) slash Tom Jones voice in the middle of this beach -mall strip area. He had about 200 chairs set up, a little aggressive in his audience turnout considering there was one lonely grandpa sitting there. We did hear Dirty Dancing’s, she’s like the wind (RIP Patrick, I heart you). Tom, he may have stole your thunder, he done did it and sang Chris Issac’s “Wicked Game” (we thought of you). Todd may have had a crush on the guy. He kept making so many comments that at one point I offered to get his autograph for him, but he was a tad too shy.

We made our way back home and got back around dark. Both of us were tired and a bit browner. We’ll be at the beach a lot.

Some observations for today:

-ketchup is called “tomato sauce” here. The bottles are shaped differently but mostly it tastes the same.

-Teenagers in Australia have underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex just like American teens. We started calling them PFC’s.

-Cows look hilarious in a field surrounded by palm trees.

-There is no tipping in restaurants so the service isn’t as quick as it is back home. It’s sometimes hard to get a second drink.

-Christmas decorations look out of place when it’s 90 degrees outside.

-SPF 30 isn’t going to cut it.