Day 15 / Day 10: Second chance

Kate left early this morning, as she had to go to Uni back in Melbourne later in the day. I'm quite glad I won't be going back to University this year.

To be perfectly honest, I would’ve been totally happy with sitting at the hostel doing nothing all day. I’m pretty burnt out. It’s not that I’m not having fun but I just love doing nothing too much and I haven’t done it much recently. Also, I’m really bad with heat and it’s zapping all the energy out of me.

But my brain said that would be wasting my time and so I made myself go into town with Cherri and Alice to have a look around Brisbane city. As soon as we started walking around, I regretted my decision. It was sweltering hot and every time we stepped out into the sun I felt like I was being burnt to a crisp. Everyone knows how much Asian people don’t like being in the sun and I’m no different.

@ Brisbane botanical garden

For the first time in my life, I welcomed the idea of going into stores to browse at things that no one was going to buy (aka shopping with girls) because the stores were air conditioned. I even treated myself to a nice jacket that caught my eye. $150 that would’ve never been spent unless I had that moment in the Gold Coast about spending money.

Iguana at the garden

Just before our sushi hunt began

We went on a 30-minute hunt for sushi because we craved it for lunch. Again, this was a highly stressful situation because of the heat and hunger. Murphy’s law as – Japanese stores are littered around the streets of Australia but as soon as we desired one they all disappeared and the city seemed to become a sushi desert. We searched for our oasis and even started hallucinating as we terribly misread a sign saying ‘Fore Court’ as ‘Food Court’ and followed the signs for a while. Finally we did manage to find a food court and we dove into the first store we saw – bingo, it was the worst sushi store of the four that were in the food court, we'd find out a little too late.

On the sushi hunt

Cherri and Alice left for Melbourne and I was left on my own from around 4pm. I enjoyed my alone time at the hostel and went for a stroll with my iPod to find some dinner. I had already had a shower and so I walked at a conscious, calculated pace – not slow enough to sizzle in the sun but not too fast to break into a sweat.

Brisbane wasn't so bad, but it had nothing great to offer either. For anyone travelling I would say you're not missing much if you bypass this city.

I enjoyed a lonesome dinner then sat on the computers for 2 hours writing up these blog posts.

Then I headed up to the room for an early night and to my delight I met a trio of Norwegian girls who were staying in my room. They were my age and spoke very good English. We quickly bonded through my usual trusted technique of spitting out everything I know about the country and saying “yeeeeah” after each fact (most of them football related). I wish I made more of an attempt to learn their names. We agreed to ignore names after the initial introductions because theirs were very obscure and impossible to pronounce. I thought they were talking to each other when they first told me their names. Now, I’ll never ever see them again. It feels like a G-rated verbal one night stand.

Peak: My jacket purchase / shower after coming back to the hostel 


Pit: The heat / Getting charged another $2 for having to get cash out from other bank's ATM for dinner / Having to listen to these two girls singing consecutive ABBA songs on stage when we walked through a University's orientation