Brissie

IMGP3400
Originally uploaded by theslaad.

It's Wicked's rules that if you're travelling up the East Coast you have to take the van in for a safety check when you get to Brisbane, so that's the first thing we did on Friday. It wasn't too long a wait with a few other vans before us - and we got a bottle of fizzy wine for our trouble, which always goes down a treat.

We caught a bus into the city centre and then went our seperate ways for an hour or so to do a bit of Christmas shopping. We went for a drink on the Queen Street Mall where it's pedestrianised and a few different street performers were doing their thing. We watched a Charlie Chaplin guy for ages - it's funny watching people's reactions from the safety zone of a barstool. We also watched a Didjeridoo player who was also quite funny. We bought one of his cds. It was interesting when a litltle girl asked him what country he was from!

For the rest of the afternoon and evening we headed to the park area of the South Bank which they built for the 1988 Expo. We caught a City Sea Cat to save our weary feet, it was great, our bus tickets were valid all day for the public transport network. Bargin!
We had a look around and then had some tasty Turkish food. We'd decided to go to that area because they had Christmas stuff going on. There was a Santa in his Ute with 6 White Boomers (Kangaroos), which goes along with a Aussie carol that we heard later that night. We went to a carol concert and watched some fireworks, it was a really good evening. We learnt a new song:

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,
Christmas in Australia
on a scorching summers day, Hey!
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Christmas time is beaut!,
Oh what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden Ute.

We could have stayed to watch a film in the park but we were a bit knackered so caught our bus back to the caravan park.