Off-the-Wall Experiences in Brisbane

You wouldn’t think a broken little toe would cause as much trouble as it did for me during the first couple weeks of my study abroad experience in Brisbane, but it did. I was smart enough to trip over my bed the day before school started and a week before a Green Day show to which I had had tickets for at least three months. When I bought the tickets, it sounded like a great idea to buy standing room only—you can’t beat the view and the experience of being so squished that you literally feel like you might suffocate. Okay, perhaps being squished into human pulp is not the best part of the show, but some people will give anything to be those extra few inches closer to the band, even if it means detaching your arm from its socket or your hair from your head. Unfortunately, standing room now meant a chance for my already throbbing foot to get absolutely trampled. Luckily, the standing-room section was divided into a front and back section, and I had only procured a back ticket, so my section wouldn’t be nearly as crowded; still, going was taking a serious risk of mangling my toe much worse than the bed’s leg had done.

I couldn’t just not go to the show—I had paid upwards of $60 for the ticket and I wanted to see if their politically-charged show changed at all between countries—so I had to find a way to protect my foot. Using my monthly bus pass, I limped on the next 412 bus into the CBD and hobbled into the closest pharmacy to the bus stop. There, I found the bandages section and was busying myself looking for something that would provide padding when a pharmacist walked up to me.

“Are you finding everything ok?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure. Do you have anything for protecting broken toes when you’re wearing shoes?” I responded.

“Well…” she grimaced. “Do you really have to wear shoes? Why can’t you wear those thongs (flip-flops)?”

I explained my situation to her, and how it would be a terrible idea to wear thongs to the concert that night. She uh-hummed and looked very serious, informing me that there was no way to cover up a little toe as much as I needed. Treating the whole case in a very solemn manner, she asked, “Do you want to hear my personal opinion?”

I nodded, bracing for the talk I would certainly receive, telling me that it was a dumb idea and I was risking further injury for $60 and a band I’d seen play twice before. I’d heard it plenty of times from my mother already. Instead, she said (as a grin crept onto her face), “I’d go out and get pissed before the show. If you’re flogged, you won’t be able to feel the pain, right?”

I was astounded—wouldn’t pharmacists in America get sued for saying something like that? She did, however, have a very valid point and had found the only real solution to the problem, no matter whether it made it worse the next day. I decided then and there that Australia really was the brilliant country I had built it up to be in my imagination and was the place that I really belonged. This was all, of course, while I was sharing a fit of the giggles with the kind lady and everyone else in the pharmacy was wondering which of her drugs we’d gotten into.

After we’d calmed down and had a bit more of a chat, I went home and helped myself to a couple of the ice cold beers waiting in our fridge. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fully follow her advice by getting rip-roaring drunk, since I was attending the concert alone and somehow had to find my way back home in a city I’d only lived in for a matter of weeks.

Getting to the show, being staged at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre in Boondall, to the northeast of the city, was simple. I took the bus to get into the city, and after a short walk to the station, found myself in a massive line of people, all seemingly wearing Green Day shirts, wanting to buy tickets to Zone 3. After moving through the line surprisingly quickly, I boarded the blue Shorncliffe train with every teenager in Brisbane and we were off.

Something that absolutely astounded me when I walked onto the floor of the Entertainment Centre was the order of it all. Everybody in both floor sections was sitting down in an orderly fashion waiting for the show to begin. I don’t think I’ve ever done that at a show in America, for fear of getting glued to it by a mixture of beer, spit, and god knows what else. Nobody was jostling for position or even standing slightly back waiting for a chance to charge. This struck me as an odd juxtaposition—pharmacists in this country were recommending getting trashed before even going through the doors to the show, yet everyone actually at the show were lined up like grade school kids.

Once the music started, courtesy of the opening band, Simple Plan, the organization was no more. The entire crowd stood up at once and stampeded to the front of their section before commencing bouncing up and down. I inched my way towards the back and enjoyed the rest of the show from there. Only one person bounced across my foot, and the only real source of pain was standing for 3 hours and having my foot in a shoe to begin with.

Green Day were amazing, as usual, and put on nearly the exact show they had months earlier in Houston. The crowd seemed, if this is possible, even louder than they had been in America, possibly because they get the opportunity of seeing the band less often. The show, while memorable and well worth the money, was not the highlight of my night, however. That honor lay firmly with the pharmacist and the country that sees things in a slightly different light, with a twinkle in its eye and a beer in hand—the country I was falling in love with more every minute.

For nearly two months, my computer chair in Brisbane was a plastic lawn chair. Sure, I’d steal James’ sometimes, but I felt guilty stealing it when, say, he had a final to study for. Therefore, when the office I worked at this summer had to get rid of all the executive chairs, which had been deemed “unergonomic,” I was the first to claim one as my own. Even if they did have bad back support, I couldn’t pass up a free chair when I needed one—especially when it was worth at least $200!

There was one problem with the idea of the chair—it couldn’t stay in the office, because it took up room and there was a good chance someone might yoink it for themselves. I had planned on riding the train to my friend Michelle’s house after work, where James would pick me up later in the night. He wouldn’t be coming back from the Sunshine Coast until at least 9pm, so there was no way he could pick me up from work. I felt terrible asking Michelle to pick me up in peak hour Friday traffic, so I had no other choice but to use my normal form of transportation.

Everybody laughed at me as I walked out of the office pushing a large (and conveniently, bright red) piece of office furniture. I knew I couldn’t push it all the way to the station (about 4 blocks away) because of the number of people on the sidewalks at that time of day, so I hefted it up and began slowly walking to the station. At every stop light, I would put the chair down to an audience of a thousand stares and giggles. It didn’t help that I couldn’t stop laughing at myself, which didn’t help my “I’m not crazy, I swear” argument.

I was nearly at Central Station when I heard a voice from behind me, asking if I needed any help. Before I could answer, the man said “hold this,” handed me his backpack, and took the chair out of my arms. He then asked, “I’m not going to be an accessory for doing this, am I?”

This conjured up some rather amusing images of office theft—not by stealing pens and post-it notes over the course of weeks, but rather, just walking out with entire pieces of furniture. It’s a surprise either of us made it to the station with the amount we were laughing.

When we finally walked underneath the Anzac Memorial and into the pedestrian subway into Central Station, I offered to take the chair back so he could catch his train. Saying, “no, no, it’s really quite alright,” he walked the chair up the stairs onto my platform—4, where the red Ferny Grove line leaves from—before saying goodbye and going to his platform. He was actually catching the train that I normally caught home to James’—the Ipswich line—and had missed his train to help me with the chair. Even more, he knew that the next train after the 5:09 express was the 5:23 non-express. What a nice guy.

There were two ladies checking tickets of everyone that walked on the platform, but when they saw the man deposit my chair and leave, they didn’t bother checking my ticket. All they could say was, “Wow, there really is chivalry left in the world!”

When the train arrived at the station, the mobs of people waiting actually moved away and let me on the train first. This could have been either because a) I had a large object that would be difficult to fit on the train unless I got on first or b) because they thought I was nuts and didn’t want to be too close to me. Either way, I got a prime handicapped seat—one of the spaces where the seats are against the wall, facing outwards, but flipped up. There, I deposited my chair and thought about how nice it was not to have to jostle for a seat.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the controls of the chair down quite yet, so I didn’t know how to lock it in place. There were so many people that I didn’t move around too much side to side, but at every station I would swivel around and end up facing the person next to me. I’m sure she appreciated that.

I was met at the station by a doubled-over Michelle, who couldn’t believe that I actually managed to put the chair on the train; I still couldn’t either. It was worth every strange look I got for all the laughs many of us got out of it—plus, I actually had a comfortable chair for the rest of my stay in Brizzy!

As we walked into the movie theater to see Star Wars: Episode III, the Brisbane sky was a beautiful blue, with not a cloud in sight. After we saw Anakin become the Emperor’s right-hand man, we walked out of the theater, expecting it to be dark, but still clear. We were wrong.

Not only was it pouring rain as lightning illuminated the sky, but it was hailing as well. Cristina, Megan, and I got absolutely soaked just running to the bus stop, which was barely outside the overhang.

As the bus slowly poked through Indooroopilly and St. Lucia towards the University of Queensland, we noticed something odd outside the window. The entire landscape was coated in white. How could it possibly be snowing in Brisbane? Even though it was the beginning of winter, we were still in a semi-tropical area where I doubt it has ever snowed. It quickly dawned on us that it had actually hailed so much that drifts of it were building up in people’s yards.

When we got off the bus, we were faced with a half-mile walk to our apartment. This was pretty interesting, since it was still pelting it down just as much as when we got on the bus. Not only did this involve taking off our shoes and sprinting, but it also meant running past a large field. Cristina and Megan were fine with this, but after a lightning bolt struck a tree on the other side of the field, I hunched over to make sure I wasn’t the tallest object in the area—I didn’t want to become a lightning rod myself!

Of course, the rain eased off nearly completely as soon as we got home. We were left with a yard completely caked in ice and an urge to drink beer, so we headed straight back out to the RE, every University of Queensland student’s favorite pub.

At the intersection of Sir Fred Schonell Drive and Gailey Road in Toowong, we saw something many Brisbane residents will never see—a gas station literally coated in hail. It covered the entire sidewalk and looked like it was at least two feet deep in some places. All around the usually busy gas pumps, children were throwing hail in the air like snow, although I’m sure it hurt a bit more on the way down. One lane of the road was completely closed because of it, which meant a traffic jam, which meant more time to watch the very bizarre sight.

We alighted from the bus at Toowong, just outside the Toowong Tower and the RE. When we rounded the corner and poked our heads into the beer garden, we noticed something odd. It was a Thursday night—two for one night, and therefore normally a very busy one—yet there was virtually no one there and the bouncers were not checking IDs. There were a few people—including James and the rest of the sailing club—inside the RE, but not very many. This was because the beer garden had been coated in ice as well. It had been scraped aside since the storm, leaving a massive 3-foot-high pile in the corner and plenty leftover to cover pretty much all surfaces.

Then the RE did another surprising thing—they closed, at 8:30 at night! This was probably due partly to the incredibly low patronage and partly to the fact that everyone was going outside, picking up ice, and shoving it down everyone else’s shirts! I nearly froze my hands off hiding ice, waiting for the perfect time to get James. Fortunately, he didn’t get me back; instead, after we had left the RE for the Regatta hotel, also in Toowong, he and a few others cornered the only Kiwi in the group and coated him in ice!
The crazy thing about the hail was that, even though the next few days had temperatures well above freezing, it didn’t melt. The drifts at the Shell station in Toowong were there for at least two days, and even a week later, there were some remnants of the “snow” lining many of the roads in Toowong. As we rode the bus to the grocery store the next day, a man heard our American accents and asked us if we had seen snow, and if so, is this what it was like because it was the closest he would ever get to seeing it. The wonder of the whole weather experience was second only to the snow Houston got on Christmas Eve, 2004—something that will also never happen again.

Every Sunday, the UQ waterskiing & wakeboarding club meets to enjoy some aquatic fun. Unfortunately, their sheds don’t back up onto a lake so clean that cities get their water from it, like the last place I wakeboarded; instead, they back up onto the Brisbane River, which, on inspection of Wikipedia’s fine pages, I found contains “sediment from surrounding lands, excess nutrients, hydrocarbons, pesticides and bacteria.” The article then states that “this river is also considered too murky and it is not recommended to swim in its waters.” Even if Wikipedia can be wrong, I think this article is right on the money.

One Sunday after work, James, who is a member of the wakeboarding club (which, to be a member, you have to pay $60 a semester to be a member of UQ Sport, $50 a year for the actual club, and $1 per minute in the water), decided to join his friend Mark at the sheds. I tagged along, mainly to watch (and take pictures of) both of them spectacularly eating it. The last time we went, two weeks prior, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself, so I figured why not go again to watch the boys actively poison themselves?

Being the middle of winter and the semester break, it wasn’t totally surprising that only a small portion of the club was there, although I was amazed that we were allowed on the boat as soon as we got out of James’ car. Mark was already suited up, so James and I hopped in the boat and we were off. Mark was trying to do quite a few more tricks than he had the previous week, and ended up falling face-first into the river a few times. The boat driver/coach kept telling him to calm down a little bit, which he did, after having the most spectacular wipeout I’ve ever seen on a wakeboard. When he tried to jump the wake, he ended up sideways, and then hit the water in such a twisted-up state that we knew he must have seriously injured himself.

As we hauled him back into the boat, he said that his knee had made some funny noises and kind of hurt. By the time we got him back to the dock, his knee had inflated to at least twice its normal size. All the while, he insisted that nothing was wrong (although he later had an MRI that said he had partially torn a ligament, which didn’t require surgery but did require a lot of time off from wakeboarding and any other sports).

After I ran over to the Union complex to get him some ice, we all loaded back into the boat for James’ turn. I got some good pictures of him falling over (and quite a few of him standing and jumping the wake as well), but he luckily escaped without serious injury. He finally gave up after about twenty minutes of wakeboarding when he fell face first into the river and gave himself an enormous headache. He was fortunate he wasn’t slightly to his right when he fell, or else he might have gotten a face full of coke cans and other fun things that were floating by on the river.

James started trying to convince me to give wakeboarding a try as soon as he got back in the boat. Even though I wasn’t a member, I was allowed to give it a try once (no more than that, because of insurance issues). I did want to give it a go, but I didn’t particularly want to waste my money on something I was fairly certain I couldn’t do, after trying for hours on end a couple years before and only managing to go in a semicircle as I pulled myself up and then fell straight back down again.

Somehow, I soon found myself sitting on the dock, being coached on exactly how to sit in the water and how to pull myself up once the boat took off. I managed to pull myself up the right way, but since I was sitting on dry land and someone was holding the rope (rather than a boat yanking it out of my hands), I still wasn't confident that I would be able to replicate that in the water.

They fortunately did not make me try my first time from the dock--that hadn't worked out well for Mark, so I thought it would work out less well for me. The only problem with getting in the water was how absolutely freezing it was. It wasn't quite as cold as the water in the Blue Mountains, which had caused me to jump immediately back out again, but it still gave me the chills. Shivering, I signaled that I was ready and the boat took off, with me behind it, somewhat staggering and then falling over. I had a few more false starts before I finally managed to stand up and board for a reasonable distance before eating it again. It was really a lot of fun--I was skimming down the river, sometimes with an audience (either the wakeboarding club people on the dock or people on the CityCat ferry, traveling on its route between Guyatt Park at the University of Queensland). I certainly didn’t try to jump the wake, even though I ended up significantly to the right of it, because I thought that would be stretching it.

Even though I stayed up for a relatively short time compared to the boys, I was still excited and happy that it hadn't taken hours of frustration to do so. I managed to stand up once more for an extended time before my twenty minutes were up; I also managed to get one good mouthful of some very foul-tasting water.

The only feelings better than flying down the river on a wakeboard were putting on a sweatshirt, which dampened my chills but didn't get rid of them, and taking a long shower when I got home. Even with a shower, I was definitely concerned that when I turned the lights out that night, I would glow in the dark. Okay, maybe the Brisbane River isn't quite that bad, but I can certainly think of cleaner places to indulge in watersports. Still, I had a blast, and spent the rest of my trip suggesting cable waterski parks as something to do on the weekend; this was to no avail, but hopefully I'll make it back out on the water soon.

If you like shopping for somewhat oddball, artsy things, weekend markets throughout Australia are the place to be. Every Saturday and Sunday, there are a plethora of markets set up throughout Brisbane, and you could spend all day browsing to your heart’s content. By the middle of March, my friends and I had checked out the South Bank, Riverside, and King George Square markets, but hadn’t made it to the largest of them all in Fortitude Valley. So, one Saturday morning, we hopped on the bus and headed into the city.

Pretty much any bus you catch in Brisbane’s CBD that has a number in the 100s will take you through Fortitude Valley. Many of these used to stop along Adelaide Street, but as of (the Australian) winter 2006, Adelaide Street is under major construction, so the bus stops have been moved to neighboring streets in the CBD area. All information about these new stops, along with anything about trains, buses, and ferries in Brisbane, can be found at Translink.

Cristina and I had found the Valley somewhat accidentally the week before, when we decided to stroll from Riverside (near Eagle Street Pier) to Fortitude Valley—a walk that took quite some time, given my broken toe. This had its advantages, though, since we actually knew basically where we were going this time. When we got off the bus, we walked to Brunswick Street, where the Valley train station is (it bears the original name of "Brunswick Street Station"), and crossed the road. The pedestrian-only road that greeted us is the center of Brisbane’s "Chinatown"; it has a nice atmosphere, complete with Chinese architecture, but is paltry compared to the offerings of Sydney or even Houston.

One thing I can’t knock about the Valley is the markets themselves. There were many more stalls here than in King George Square and Riverside combined, and they were offering all sorts of artsy things that you possibly would never need but would be cool to have anyway. We enjoyed walking up and down the aisles, just browsing, until we came to a stall covered in thousands of trinkets. Many of these were pendants, carved from wood or bone, and each one only cost about $2. We were sucked in, and I bought at least five of varying colors and designs—how could I pass up bone fishhooks that I had wanted to buy so much in New Zealand, for a fraction of the cost? Cristina and I both splashed out and bought ourselves each a more expensive pendant made of shell—and they cost a whopping $9 total.

As we were sorting through the immense array of jewelry, strains of music caught us by surprise. What was going on, and why were people all of the sudden flocking over to the next street, the home to assorted Irish pubs? Curious, we wandered over, and found ourselves watching the beginning of Brisbane’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. No matter that it was Saturday and St. Patty’s Day wasn’t until the following Thursday—people were celebrating anyway. Revelers sat on pub balconies, absolutely flogged and drinking green Irish beer, and it was barely the afternoon!

This wasn’t a small parade, either. There were multiple Irish bands, consisting of be-kilted men playing the bagpipes and the drums. There was a Mini Cooper decked out in Guinness labels. There were trucks full of "young Irish punters from Cork, in appreciation of Guinness." People representing every county in Ireland marched past with their respective flags. Schoolkids marched in bands and jumped rope. Lots of Gaelic football clubs (from which Australian Rules football is derived) marched past. Children were dressed in traditional outfits and did traditional dances. It really showed that even though Australians are incredibly proud to be Australian, they haven’t forgotten their roots and are proud to celebrate those as well.

All in all, we got a lot more than we planned for when we decided to take a quick trip to the Valley to see the markets. The only thing missing from the parade was some Guinness for ourselves—but we made sure to have some on St. Patrick’s Day, with shamrocks drawn in the foam and all!