First day in Brisbane…

Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 1:18 am

HG left to work at 7:30 in the morning. I got up not long after that to unpack my case and had a shower. I got the second set of key from the reception on the way out along with a map of Brisbane. I left the apartment around 10:30am. It was very sunny but not too hot. I walked down to Fortitude Valley to meet HG for lunch. His office is near Chinatown so I went to a Chinese supermarket nearby to check out their stocks. They have huge selection of Asian products but very disappointed in fresh vegetables. There are a lot of Asian restaurants around there including Thai. We had Chinese food for lunch.

After lunch I walked along Ann Street down to Queen Street. I tried to find the city farmer’s market at Brisbane Square. I didn’t know where Brisbane square is exactly but I know roughly that it’s on Queen Street. I walked down to Queen Street mall and it was so crowded. I saw white long legged birds wandered around this area. At that time I didn’t know what kind of bird they are. There are a lot of people smoking here in Australia. Every time I stopped and sat on the bench to look at my map there would be someone stopped there and smoked which was annoying. After walking to the end of Queen Street I finally found the Farmer market. I had a look around but didn’t buy anything. Then I walked on to Victoria bridge to cross the river to South Bank Parklands. There was a street beach there. While I was taking more photos of white long-legged birds at the beach, there was two guys sat near the beach asking me if I wanted him to take my photo with the birds. I said no thanks, then he said if I wanted to take his photo instead. After that he introduced himself as Bob from Papua New Guinea and his friend named Bryan from Germany. Bob did most of the talking unlike Bryan. Bob told me that the white long-legged bird is called White Ibis. According to Brisbane city council ibis is protected under State Wildlife Legislations. After a small talk with Bob, I walked to Goodwill bridge, a bridge for bicycles and pedestrians, back to the other side of the river. I walked into QUT ground next to the city botanic garden to George Street and back to Queen Street. I had to walk quickly because I had to meet HG at Woolworth supermarket at 5:10pm and it was almost 5pm and I still have a lot of walking to get there. We did some shopping and walked back to the apartment. I checked on Google map later that night and found that I was walking about 10 km. My feet were sore and I was so tired. After having a shower I went to sleep in no time.

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