Brisbane etc.

Sydney! Once again it has amazed us as a city. Polite drivers, great international food courts, breathtaking nighttime views of the harbor bridge... We arrived at the international airport and immediately hopped on a train to Circular Quay. It only took about ten minutes to get all the way into town, and another few minutes from the station to find our hotel, which was located right on the harbor. A great place, we found it the last time we were in Sydney and knew even then that we wanted to try staying there. So, our first night was pretty much uneventful, the only major event was our attempt to find a place to eat, which took us almost an hour of trekking around the downtown business sector. Finally we ended up in a Chinese/Malaysian place with neon depictions of Poseidon and some gigantic lobsters in a tank. Needless to say, it was verrryyy tasty(sarcasm). Ahem. Actually it wasn’t bad, only my stomach was upset to begin with and chinese doesn’t help much... Unfortunately it was my dad’s night to choose dinner and that was his choice. If it were up to me we’d be eating Italian six nights a week and Greek or Indian the other. Oh well. So the next day we (my dad and I) searched all of the newspaper listings for Australia so we could, appropriately, see it in Australia. If only we had been in Darwin or somewhere in the outback. Before our movie we had about two hours to spare so we ate lunch at a delicious (but strangely empty) Thai restaurant, then wandered around until we found a strange little fossil shop. The man inside was obviously very taken with his fossils, as he well should have been. A huge collection; beautiful amber and nautiluses. We spent a good forty-five minutes in there before we finally went to watch the movie. I liked it quite a bit, although I can see why some people would be annoyed with the more tedious sappy parts. It’s highly predictable. Also, you have to be a pretty steadfast Nicole Kidman fan (like me) to be able to ignore the collagen implants in her lips and the excess botox stretching her forehead. I didn’t mind it because I think she’s an excellent actress, but I understand where the critics are coming from. But enough of the movie. Afterwards, my dad and I found a bus that took us all the way back to “our neighborhood”, necessary due to the fact that we had taken a twenty minute cab ride just to get there so we could see the film three hours earlier than we would have been able to otherwise. Italian for dinner that night, though, amazingly, not because of me. Next day we putted around in the Museum of Sydney (MOS), which was intriguing but not very entertaining in my opinion. For it to have been more interesting, for me at least, they would have done less of the ‘gigantic walls of text’ and gone with more of the ‘helpful tidbits with pictures’. Also, their current featured exhibit, “Tails of the City”, felt more like it belonged in a children’s section or animal shelter than a city museum. Let’s just say that there were far too many fake animals (no, not stuffed, just fake) in that room for it to be taken seriously. After the museum we once again wandered around downtown (we think) Sydney, which resulted in our finding an elusive Krispy Kreme shop and the eating of doughnuts.  Nothing else particularly interesting occurred in Sydney, because it seems that all we did for the rest of the time there was hang around the hotel watching Ugly Betty dvds. Oh, actually, that’s not true, we also spent some time wandering around “The Rocks”- the area beneath the bridge on the Quay side that was formerly the ‘bad side of town’, involving prostitutes, etc.- trying to find the hotel that Steph and Jay stayed in the first time they came together. Judging by the area I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly luxury... Luckily for us in our wanderings, the area has been cleaned up since the mid-eighties when they were first there. Also happening before we left Sydney was a swimming lesson for the Mum and Dud, ahem, Dad, at which time I attempted to teach them to do flipturns. It was very amusing. Anyway, after Sydney we flew up to Brisbane, then searched the entire domestic and international car rental section for our car, apparently coming from ‘Letz’ rentals. No matter how many people we spoke to we couldn’t find a single person who had heard of the place, let alone knew where to find it. We ended up with Hertz. Since then we’ve driven five hours or so to Iluka, current home of Mike, Alisa, and Elias, whom you might know as the family that set off from Kodiak two or so years ago with their one-year-old on a sailboat headed for Australia. We’ve just been hanging around in a rented beach house for a few days while the weather, previously hot and sunny, gets progressively worse. At this precise moment it’s pouring buckets and there’s a frog in the drainpipe making noises that resemble a sixty-five year old chain smoker trying to sing.