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Published: January 13th 2008
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Im still in Brisbane and Im not entirely sure what I did day by day in the last few days but Ill give you the general gist of things. I've pretty much explored the whole of Brisbane city centre and some of its inner suburbs. I now know Brisbane better than I do Birmingham.
Having done most of the usual touristy stuff I wanted to do something a bit different and opted to do a ghost tour of the nearby Toowong cemetary. The cemetary is absolutely huge and we only walked about a third of the way in over two and a half hours. We were lead on our ghost tour by a creepy guy called Jack Simm who was a really nice guy and really knew his stuff about the macabre part of Brisbane's history. It was pretty cool going round the cemetary in the pitch black and only being able to see the endless rows of graves stretch out. We stopped at various points and specific graves where Jack would theatrically tell a story about the residents of Toowong cemetary. My favourite story was about the first governor of Brisbane who was also the first to be buried
Me next to a grave
This statue is supposed to move and sometimes walk off in Toowong. In his crypt he had a cards table put in so he could enjoy a good game of poker in the afterlife and then all his mates got buried next to him later on so they could join in. During the tour we also tried to summon the Grim Reaper himself but strangely enough nothing happened apart from a gust of wind, which Jack got very excited about. Me and the rest of the group were not so sure! After the tour Jack revealed that he is planning to be embalmed when he dies and will be put inside a herse and displayed as a tourist attraction. Evidently a weird guy but I thought he was ace.
One place I hadnt seen in Brisbane was Mt. Cootha, which is really just a hill. A short bus ride from the city center dropped me off but I later found out I needed to go further on to actually get to Cootha. I got off by Brisbane's largest botanical gardens and explored them happily in the baking sun. The gardens are full of exotic plants, lizards and there are huge spiders everywhere you look. Next to the gardens was
a planetarium. First thing that came to my mind was boring as I'm sure most of you are thinking. But as I had nothing else to do I gave it a chance and watched one of their shows. The show was called 'Are we alone?'. You go into the theatre and watch the show project on a huge dome shaped screen above your head. It held some interesting nuggets of information and was cheesily narrated by Harrison Ford. I'm sure he said something like 'Hi. I'm Harrison Ford, you may remember from such movies as....'
Today has been a day of doing what I do best, watching football and having a few beers. In the morning I got up a went to watch the west brom game. It has been about 6 months since I last watched us play and it was great to see us again. We played poorly but won 3-1 so I was happy. I was then spotted in my baggies shirt by a guy who supports the albion and lives in Halesowen! Its a really small world sometimes!
In the evening I returned to the Suncorp stadium to watch a game between Queensland Roar
and Sydney FC. It was a shocking display of football and ended in a dull nil nil draw. It was interesting to see some players who used to ply their trade in England like Tony Popovic, Danny Tiatto, Craig Moore, Michael Bridges, Steve Corica (ex-dingle) and Juninho (the Middlesborough one).
What interested me about seeing this game was to see what sort of shape the Australian game is in and whether it is taking off here. The attendance was about 33,000 which is a record for an a-league game here at Sydney which indicates that popularity may be increasing. The atmosphere was very good considering the fans only filled just over half the ground. There are few groups of english style fans and it was funny to hear them sing things like 'she fell over' and other ruder songs which we use in England. However the fans I sat next to did not seem knowledgable and one guy told his son that Beckham can score 40 yard free kicks and that probably the whole of the Manchester United team could as well. He obviously has never seen Gary Neville take a shot.
Considering these are two of the
contenders for the league title, the quality of football is very poor. It was mainly long ball football and it was very scrappy. The teams had a good mix of experienced professionals who have played in top leagues abroad and local youngsters but still there looked to be very little promising talent.
I think they are going the right way about evolving football over here and also trying to make things better for their homegrown talent. Its evident that it will take a long time to become one of the elite sports here and it is certain that it will never overtake cricket, aussie rules or rugby. But the future is bright for football here and I feel that they will soon start to fill grounds if they carry on the way they are. The premier league has massive coverage here and the recent success of the Socceroos in the World Cup has brought in some fresh fans.
Bit of amateur sports journalism for you there. I promise the next blog will be more travel related!
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