Time for Brissy!

May 15th

This past week was full of lectures, tutorials, group meetings, presentations, and the finalizing of group projects. With all that done and out of the way, it was time to head to Brisbane for the weekend! Brisbane is just an hour from the Sunny Coast and is an easy outlet to experience some city life.

The public transportation in Australia isn’t that great, but it is still pretty easy to grab a bus and train, then before you know it your already right in the city. Our first mission was to go straight to Beaches travel agency so four of us could book our study week trip to Fraser Island and the Whitsundays. It is claimed that if we left Australia without visiting these places, we would have missed the whole purpose of our stay here! With that said, we knew we had to make it happen! Almost all the international students have already done Fraser so we did not compile a big group tour, but there will be five of us together which is perfect!

Next we dropped our stuff at the hostel, grabbed some coffee and food, and explored the city. We walked around the shops even though NONE of us have spare money to buy stuff. Some of the girls made their souvenir/gift purchases because there is an abundance of cheap tourist shops! It was then time to head back, grab some warm clothes, and trek over to purchase our rugby tickets.

Rugby is huge in Australia and this weekend was our one chance to catch a game! None of us had been before so it was a new, exciting experience for all of us. In Oz there are three types of footy: Rugby Union, Rugby XXX, and AFL. It was cool to see how many people are so passionate about their rugby! On our way back from the game we came across a pub doing karaoke, so we stopped to laugh for a bit, however know we had to do it as well! Since it was so fitting that there were five girls, we rocked Wannabe by Spice Girls for the crowd! Pretty entertaining I am sure.

Saturday was so so beautiful out so we walked around the city all day. We mostly tried to walk along the river and then up and through the botanical gardens. It amazes me that such a beautiful park can be located right in the center of a busy city. We also took a look around a local museum and were lucky enough to go up in the tower for a great sight over the city!

I was able to finish off my weekend spending Sunday at the beach relaxing! We haven’t had heat like we did this weekend for a couple weeks now so it was a really nice change. What I thought would be just me and my friend Jess turned into about 10 of us. The boys mostly all surfed, the girls layed out and listened to tunes, and we all randomly went for walks around Alex or runs down the beach. Makes for a great morning : )