Brisbane's a pretty cool place

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We arrived in Brisbane on friday afternoon in time to book ourselves on the last tour of the Castlemaine Perkins brewery - home of the famous XXXX beers AND to get tickets for saturday night's "footy"* clash between the Brisbane Broncos and the Canberra Raiders. Our hostel ("Aussie Way" - highly recommended) was within walking distance of both the stadium and brewery - lucky or what!

The brewery tour was very well put together and informative (apparently the name of the beer is and old way of denoting quality and NOT because Queenslanders cannot spell BEER) and involved several very fine samples from their range of beers, ales and stouts.

The rugby was also a great night out with the home team winning 24-18 with a try scored right in front of our stand. We even felt tempted to join in with the home fan chanting which included the gem "you suck, Raiders, you suck" (words very easy to learn).

We've spent the days since exploring the city via the City Cat ferry system (Brisbane is built in the bends of the very wide Brisbane river) and seeing the sights: Parliament house, University, South Bank, Botanic gardens, markets etc. We also took a bus out to Mount Coot-Tha (which affords excellent views of the city) and walked back through Eucalypt forests and very dry creeks (it's winter).

We've arranged to stay on an extra day to see some public movie screenings (as part of the Brisbane International Film Festival) - we've got tickets for three tomorrow, starting at 10am in an outside arena in the arts complex on the south bank. One is a "doco" about the late great Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone and founder of the Seattle grunge music thing...the other two are Australian films about Surf culture and Aussie Rules footy...

* "footy" = Rugby League (in Queensland)

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