brisvegas: day four

The watchword of this morning was "Nothing"... that's pretty much exactly the amount of an idea I had about what we were doing today... nothing, nothing, nothing.

My mood was decidedly apathetic when I woke up, and fiddling around with my phone didn't help a whole lot.

I didn't even know what I felt like for breakfast... never mind what we were going to do with the rest of the day.

Breakfast turned out to be reasonably easy to solve once we actually got outside of the hotel and wandered about a bit... I just picked a direction like I knew where the hell I was going (the direction we generally don't go for some reason, and while we were walking I remembered this little vegetarian place down on Eagle Street... Kitchen Sanitarium.

Turned out to be a good idea, even if they didn't do coffee... Ma and I both had the Brioche French Toast with poached raspberries and yoghurt. Very tasty, and nowhere near as heavy as I was expecting it to be.

I still content that the only guys working in the food service industry in Brisbane are homosexualists though... sweet and helpful, but so very gay.

Since we were up at that end of the city, we figured we may as well just wander down to Fortitude Valley. I can now say that I've seen The Valley... or at the very least I've seen Chinatown and the Brunswick Street Mall.

How best to describe them?

Chinatown appears to be more or less the one street, pretty much like Adelaide's Chinatown... although like everything else in Brisbane, it seems to have been overly themed and architectured to within an inch of its life.

The other thing that kind of amazed me was that most of it was shut. Sure it was still fairly early, and yes, a large proportion of the places were restaurants... but it felt particularly barren.

Contrast that with the Brunswick Street Mall... which was full of people... but it was pretty damn dodgy, and I wanted to spend as little time there as humanly possible.

The only up side to The Valley was the fact that I finally found some honest to god street art! And featuring at least one artist that I recognised. I should have known that I'd need to go to the dodgy part of the city before I starting finding street art.

Oddly enough, my first thought was that it felt like coming home. Weird, I know.

After that Ma got it into her head that she wanted to head over to Spring Hill. I'm not exactly sure why... and especially because as the Hill part of the name suggests, it was all up hill. And we hadn't bothered to bring our hats with us (that morning weather is deceptive, but mostly I blame Ma). And other than a community radio station totally covered in Beastman street art, there wasn't a whole lot of anything during the very, very long walk along St Pauls Terrace.

And then the seemingly even long walk along Leichardt Street...

It was kinda worth it in the end though... because at the end of that particular Boring Brick Road is the Roma Street Parkland... which almost feels like Botanical Gardens Lite... more structured and with more places to play and hold events and stuff, but still very pretty.

Being that we were sans hats, we didn't do much wandering other than the Spectacle Garden... but there were a whole slew of photo opportunities there, especially once I strapped on my 300mm lens again.

There's something weird about the Queensland sun... whether it's because it's both further north and further east or not I don't know... but I've been really shit at judging the time based on sun position during this trip. I was sure that we'd been in the Parkland for a good long while and it must have been at least 2pm, but no, it wasn't even noon by that point.

By the time we eventually left the Parkland it felt like late afternoon, but wasn't quite 1pm (and I only really remember that because the clock in King George Square struck 1pm while we were there.

Because we were a world of thirsty and hungry by that point, we stopped at Groove Train and had Caesar Salad. Now, I'm not really a Food Nazi, but if Caesar Salad has a poached egg on top of it, it should be hot right... as should the bacon? Yeah, not so much in this salad... I think the egg was a leftover from breakfast. But it wasn't bad otherwise, and it did arrive at the table fairly quickly... so I can't complain too much.

After lunch we wandered in the general direction of the hotel, but detoured up to Comics Etc for the third and (probably) final time... this blind box stuff is addictive... especially when it's so easy to get your hands on.

And given that it's really the only thing that I've bought that isn't food on this trip, I think I'm allowed.

Anyway, we detoured back to the hotel to drop off our purchases and couldn't really decide what the hell we wanted to do next. That really only seems to be a major problem when we're in the hotel, so we headed back out again and ended up wandering around the Myer Centre across the street.

Not especially inspiring, but I have to say that the shopping in the Brisbane CBD leaves a lot to be desired... everything just seems to be very similar to the stuff we have back in Adelaide. A few regional variations here and there... but no cute little laneways or arcades with funky little shops in them like Melbourne... not the sheer number of stores like Sydney... it has all been very m'eh.

I did find the Daria boxed set in the ABC Shop... and I while I know it's been around in Adelaide, I haven't seen it yet, so I snapped it up!

After that we kind of just traipsed from one lacklustre shopping arcade to another, mostly by following the "avoid going up" rule of city orienteering... neither of us were really that impressed with climbing any more.

Eventually we both gave up and made it back to the hotel (after a quick detour for a couple of Krispy Kreme donuts) for our "Pre Dinner Rest".

The first trip I ever took to Melbourne, I left the hotel first thing in the morning and pretty much didn't even stop by again until after dinner... on the go, all day long... but these last few trips, we do like a nice rest in the afternoon. And yes, it's partly because I'm travelling with Ma... but we do a hell of a lot of walking on these trips, and my feet are currently covered with all manner of interesting blisters (stupid new sneakers).

Another quick aside... I've now officially had three male escorts hit on me via iPhone apps this trip.

It doesn't bother me or anything... it's just worth mentioning.

After our little rest, we headed back across the river to South Bank... Ma was in the mood for seafood for dinner, so we headed over to check out a restaurant, Decks, we'd seen both times we'd been over there.

I wasn't sure about it since I hadn't actually seen anybody in it any of the other times we wandered past... turns out it was just a little on the pricey side. And foolishly, we looked at the wrong menu outside (the lunch menu instead of the dinner one) and found something that sounded really nice and wasn't an arm and a leg... but when we sat down and perused the menu it obviously wasn't there, and there really wasn't anything else on the menu that sounded half as interesting.

We had actually decided to leave and go somewhere else, and Ma mentioned to the older gentleman that had seated us (who may or may not have been the owner/manager) that she'd been more interested in something on the (lunch) menu outside... and I'm guessing because they may not get a lot of customers, he said there wasn't any reason we couldn't have it. Which I thought was very nice of him! And it turned out to be a very good choice... very tasty. So you have to be happy with that.

After dinner we wandered back along South Bank, trying to avoid all the joggers and cyclists who seem to be out in force, possibly practising for some big run next weekend.

And as though to prove that sometimes you need to leave the Universe alone and let it do its own thing... after spending three evenings playing iPhone ping pong with a number of gentlemen (with varying degrees of enthusiasm... both on my part and their's), I found myself with a young gentleman caller who proceeded to show me exactly what Queensland men are made of.

*insert suggestive eyebrow waggling here*

A fitting end to our Brisbane holiday really... although we kind of have to find something to occupy our time for a big chunk of the day tomorrow too. I foresee another somewhat early ride to the airport.

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