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Published: September 19th 2007
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Conventional travel wisdom dictates that the closer you move towards the equator, the warmer it should get. Equally so, the more you fill a travel blog with stories about the weather, the less people will be inclined to read it. Please bear with us though, one of these days, we will land in a place which is known for being hot, and it will be hot. Not so Brisbane. For those of you who are not fully acquainted with Brisbane, it is situated on Australia’s eastern coast a good 2 hours on a plane closer to the equator than Melbourne is (as I write this at work in Brisbane, Melbourne is currently enjoying between 32 and 38 degrees on a daily basis). It is sandwiched between The Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast, two place names which should give you cause for some optimism regarding prolonged sunshine. Yet everyone here is saying how it is the coldest summer they can remember and they have all been praying for rain so that the dams can fill up again as they are at record lows.
Lee and I should have dragged a dam around with us since we left Edinburgh, we’d have
the freedom of the city of Brisbane by now.
Brisbane is on a completely different scale to Melbourne, there is a population of around 1.1 million people here as opposed to the 4.5 in Melbourne. The Brisbane River which winds right through the central business district is one of the main travel routes around the city, with ferries stopping all along it making it really relaxing to get about and convenient (a day ticket will cost about $5 but will also get you on buses and trains). In Melbourne, the Yarra is just a muddy line going through the city. We’d been in Brisbane about an hour and a half and we’d already decided we liked the place more than Perth or Melbourne. Nothing has changed so far.
As is the norm with our Tracey, nothing is ever simple. She was working two separate jobs at the time of our arrival and was unable to meet us from the airport, so she sent one of her pals, Renee (‘allo ‘allo), to pick us up and drop us off at Tracey’s house. Basically it meant that we felt a wee bit like we did in Perth, sitting about the
A Relaxing Sunday by The River
This spot is aboput a 5 minute walk from our house. You can't really complain. house for a couple of hours on our own, waiting for her to get in from work. Once she did get in though, it was straight to the bottle shop, to pick up a couple of bottles of wine, and a strange, fizzy mixture called Trevi, $4.50 worth of fun in a bottle. For those on a budget, this is the drink for you.
We’re staying in a “Queenslander”, which is a type of house common to, well, Queensland really. Basically, it’s a bungalow on stilts, which means that we have a balcony to sit on at night and enjoy the drunk people playing cricket on the pitches during the day and then the drunk people staggering out of The Pineapple, the pub across the road, at night. These drunk people may or may not have included us at some stage. Tracey’s housemate is Mark, and he has introduced us to The Jaegerbomb, a lovely drink which involves dropping a shot glass of Jaegermeister into a half-pint of red bull and then swallowing quickly. It’s a nice Aussie touch on the “depth charge” that we have at home. Nicer too!!
Living on a budget is really easy in
Brisbane, everywhere has 2 for 1 nights and a movie-and-a-meal for $16 offers so it doesn’t mean you have to sit in the house all the time when you are bored. There is also The South Bank, an area that runs along the river (not on the North Bank funnily enough) and has loads of restaurants, bars, entertainment venues and there is always something going on during the summer (the outdoor cinema recently had a free screening of The Goonies, a classic I think we’ll all agree) and all along the rest of the river there are places to hire kayaks or go rock climbing. The South Bank also has a man-made beach so that the people of Brisbane can head down there after their day at work and go for a swim and soak up some late afternoon rays. The swimming area is massive and there are lifeguards on duty until 9pm. It’s a brilliant facility and there are plans to build a children’s mini water park there as well to keep the adults happy. If you are not the active type, there are loads of barbecue areas where you can just take some food down and eat things.
Kangaroo Point Cliffs
This is also an abseiling mecca in Queensland The barbecues along the river are always completely spotless, even though they are maintained by the public, not sure if this would be the case in Scotland.
As usual, the fun had to stop at some point and Lee and I have once again set off for the nearest recruitment agency to look for work. 3 hours of interviews, Excel tests, Word tests and health and safety videos was not really what we had in mind for our trip around Oz but these are the evils that are necessary to get by when you are here. Our agents found work for us within 24 hours which was nice but it meant starting on January 2nd which couldn’t have been less convenient if they had asked us to walk to work on our hands as well, but it turned out ok in the end.
Lee is working with the Ports Corporation of Queensland and is an Acting Corporate Assistant. I knew Lee could do the Corporate Assistant bit in her sleep, but if you have ever seen her trying to look interested when the cricket’s on the TV, then you’ll know the Acting part might be a struggle. The
girl that Lee is filling in for left Lee a print-out of her daily duties, and these include, making coffee, tidying the conference room and changing over the data tapes at the end of each day. The life of a Corporate Assistant is indeed a varied and stimulating one.
I, however, got a wee bit lucky with my job. My job is in Woolloongabba, known to most other people as The Gabba. It’s with the Queensland government’s Department of Natural Resources and Water (like water isn’t a natural resource). If I leave the house at 07.50, I am at work at 07.54. It’s that close you can see my work from our back garden, next to the cricket ground. I’m working in a warehouse which stores maps for the whole of Queensland and various regional offices, so they order the maps, and I send them out to them. I reckon there’s about 2 hours work to do each day and the rest of the time, I play cards and I have also been taught how to bowl leg-spin, a la Shane Warne, during various games of warehouse cricket. It’s a hard life I tells ya !!
We come
in at the end of each day and compete to see had the most boring day at work.
One of the other notable parts of our trip is also the amount of people we have met from back home in Scotland, so while we were here we thought we would take a train down the Gold Coast and meet up with Jamie (Midge to his pals) and Tanya. They were over seeing family so we went down to Burleigh Head, about an hour out of Brisbane by train and spent an afternoon of beers and beaches with them, so it was good to catch up with more familiar faces.
The Gold Coast is home to all of Australia’s theme parks. They have Warner Brothers, Seaworld, Wet ‘N’ Wild, MGM, Waterworld and Dreamworks to name but a few. Tracey managed to get her hands on a free ticket for Waterworld for Lee and I so we planned to go down there and try out the all the new rides before Christmas but a mixture of hangovers and long-lies scuppered those plans. The tickets were valid for 6 months so we had plenty of time to use them.
Christmas
and New Year were next on the cards and they will enjoy their own separate entries shortly.
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