discovering Brisbane - 7.09

Started off from Noosa on Monday morning around 10am, made it to Brisbane in a bit more than 2 hours. I was dropped off by my hostel, meanwhile Ave went back home, so I had close to 4 hours on my own. What to do what to do :) Decided to explore the city a bit.

From my hostel they gladly gave me the map of the city and already drew some lines on it where I could go for my exploration trip - so I followed the lines on the map :)

First stop was Botanic Gardens. What amazes me is that they have set botanic gardens up in the city center in one of the local parks - how nice is that? The same was in Hong Kong. This is perfect setup as it is easily accessible by everybody. Another amazing thing was that I saw tens and tens of people using the grass areas in the park for structured workout grounds. When I say structured I mean they were doing all kinds of exercises there - using cones for marking down different workout stations, doing jumps over the cones, doing squats with weights and on and on the list goes. Plus there were many many runners and step-walkers.

After Botanic Gardens the line on the map took me to the South Bank of Brisbane river. Park runs all the way alongside the river with beautiful recreation areas, gardens and a beach :) Yes, there is sort of an artificial beach built by the river - kinda nice, it is small, seemed clean and well organized with all the little fountains and passage ways. As Ave told me this is total tourist attraction and locals don't ever go there. A big sightseeing wheel is also located by the river. South Bank park ends with arts centers and state library. Never made it to the art galleries and exhibitions unfortunately, perhaps in Sydney I'll have time for that.

Our plan for the evening was to shop a bit, have a snack and head over to the movies. Met up with Ave by Queen Street Mall and started our shopping tour, but whaddaya know, most of the shops were closed by 6pm :( Ended up having a nice dinner in the middle of the pedestrian walk and cake at a local cafe shop.

By the time we arrived at the cafe shop it was dark outside already. We made ourselves feel like at home by the corner of the shop where there was a glass wall facing to the river (river was still one block away, but we were facing towards the river). As we were chatting away and killing time I kept noticing how the whole sky lit up from time to time. At first we did not pay whole lot of attention but the lightning grew bigger and bigger with every minute. About 30 minutes later everything grew really quiet outside, like the air was standing still. I guess most of you can already guess what came next :) Very extremely strong wind followed by harsh rain. Our seats were perfect for observing the storm, the only worry we had was how are we going to get to the movies if it is raining like mad outside. Anyways, at the time the rain arrived we were keeping our fingers crossed that those huge glass walls are strong enough as what was going on outside was absolutely crazy. People seemed to fly around outside due to the strong winds and horizontally pouring rain. It was a disaster outside, rain came in waves and people tried to run to shelters as fast as possible, whoever was left outside was soaked within seconds. We kept enjoying the view and counting down minutes to head out and be prepared to get soaked as well. about 1h later when we had to head out the rain was gone :D

Move we went to see was called "Young Victoria", sweet movie. We were both expecting whole lot more drama and tears, but that never happened.