Brisbane

Saturday we took our first trip out of the Gold Coast! So far, everything we've been doing has been inside the Gold Coast region so we decided to take the hour train ride to Brisbane and go explore! Although the morning was pretty rainy, the temperature actually ended up being perfect and no bad weather can stop us! I have become a self-proclaimed master of the Queensland Translink public transportation system, so I successfully navigated all 6 of us from Bond University to the city center of Brisbane, an hour and a half train ride away. With our student bus passes, if you ride nine buses in the week, all your rides after that are free. Since I've had a packed week, I ended up not having to pay for any of my trip to Brisbane or the buses that we took in the city. It was amazing! Even if I had to pay, it was like a $5 trip, which is all the more reason to return! I absolutely loved the city. Everyone had told us that it was 'eh' and nothing too exciting but it reminded me of some of the smaller cities in Ireland that I've been to! When we got there, the first thing on our mind was food so we stopped at this super cute restaurant called JoJo's, which is apparently one of the most iconic places in Brisbane. Right below it was a store having a $2 sale for the holiday weekend so of course we stopped and did some shopping! But for $2, it's hard to not shop! After shopping for a while, we took the bus up to the Mount Coot Tha lookout point. Maddie and Christy were in a shop when the bus came so even though they tried to run, the bus left without them and they had to follow us in a taxi. But once we were all reunited, we went up to the lookout which was over the whole city and took a million pictures, as usual! It was beautiful! Looking down from the lookout began my downward spiral into nervous panic about skydiving. I wasn't even 1/4 of the height I'd be jumping from and looking at how small the city seemed made it really set in.

 Mid afternoon we hopped back on the bus and went to the cultural center of town where there's the giant ferris wheel. We wanted to wait til it was dark to ride the wheel so we wandered around the cute little part of town and stumbled upon yet another outdoor market/craft show. There were all sorts of cute stands, including one where Rachel and Christy got incredibly cute hand-carved wooden phone cases. After eating a nice dinner of Mexican food (again, not hard to find...) with the spiciest salsa of my life, we headed to the giant ferris wheel to take a ride. It was so tall, potentially taller than the one at Navy Pier in Chicago, so we got a great view of the city. This was my second moment of panic about skydiving. Again, nowhere near as high in the air and I was still terrified of the height. Then it was time to head back to Gold Coast, so we hopped on the train and got back to get some sleep before our big Sunday of adventure.

I know I'm a little behind on the blog but this weekend has totally worn me out so in the morning when I wake up I'll get all caught up with a blog about our skydiving (or lack there of...) and Australia Day adventures! As always, there's a million and ten more pictures in my facebook album 'Aussie Aussie Aussie' from all of my adventures and don't forget you can subscribe to receive an email when I update in the top right corner!

 Mount Coot Tha look out

 In our little pod on the ferris wheel

My friends are so pretty..