Red Light House

After spending so many hours on a plane, the simple act of taking my socks off was surprisingly gratifying and pleasurable. That they walked themselves over to the corner of our room to join the rest of the dirty clothes was just an added bonus. There were little placards all over our room informing us that Australia is in the middle of the worst drought in 100 years. Their apparent solution to the drought problem is a startling jump forward in toilet technology. Instead of just one mechanism to flush, they have two! Our toilet had two buttons on top of the commode, one marked with a half circle and the other marked with a full circle. It looked very much like a lunar chart, but I divined from it that the half-circle was for flushing pee-pee and the full circle provided the gravitational force necessary to flush poop and possibly werewolves.

The water shortage luckily had no effect on the quality of their showers. Sam emerged from her first shower on the Southern Hemisphere, rosy cheeked and swaddled in the hotel robe, declaring it the best shower she’d ever taken. I was eager to follow suit and the sweet, hot, high pressure jets of water were just what the doctor ordered. Any water I’d saved by using the toilet was quickly used up as I took my time scrubbing off the airplane funk and singing the collected works of Rogers and Hammerstein to the shampoo bottles. After I was done I also tried on the hotel robe, but it was an ill fit with the belt circling me just under my chest. While it provided Sammi with much amusement I decided that it was not a good look on me.

After our showers we dressed and, after confirming that there was nothing but Cricket matches and Crocodile Hunter re-runs on TV, headed out of the hotel to walk around. We wandered our way through the Queen St. Mall which is a large outdoor area designed to satisfy every consumer urge you could hope for. We marveled at a huge window display showing the story of a young wombat who wanted a part in his school’s nativity play. Each window had animatronic animals like kangaroos dressed up as the three wise men and a squadron of koala’s setting up a manger. The sleepy little wombat finally finds his roll in the play as the sleeping infant Jesus (cuz JC don’t really have much of a speaking part in that play, I guess). It was all quite wonderful and 2nd only to a Victoria’s Secret window display nearby.

From there we wandered over the Victoria Bridge to the South Bank area of Brisbane, which is really to the West, but we’re not ones to quibble over the compass. Brisbane is split across the middle by a river, which winds its way drunkenly through the city until collapses gratefully into the ocean. All along South Bank there is a board walk where you can walk along the river’s edge and see all of the tour boats and water taxis, as well as huge dinner boats that look like a haphazard assortment of sheds and tents on top of a barge…the sort of dining yacht Mad Max would like for his rehearsal dinner.

South Bank is where Brisbane held the World Expo back in 1988 and the area still has kind of a Disney Land artificialness about it. Winding walkways go past a giant wooden pagoda towards a completely man-made lagoon with a white sand beach and life guards posted on lookout. We walked past an open air market that was clearly closed for the day and then a bar that was packed to the gills with drunken revelers. A large portion of them were wearing Viking helmets. After circling around a bit more we decided that a beer with the Vikings sounded like a good idea and we headed into the fray. I ordered us two pints of Victoria Bitter and we headed upstairs to find a seat. When we got up there it seemed a little too far from the action so we turned to head back downstairs. As we did a waiter came up to me and said, “You might want to stay up here, it’s a free for all down there, mate. Everyone’s getting pissed.” He clearly had no idea who he was talking to so I thanked him for his concern and we continued on our way, finding a spot on a bench where we could watch the Vikings head-butt each other and have little luck talking to girls.

After we finished our beers (Sam’s first and my second) we started heading home. We remarked to each other on the fairly standard dress code the Brisbane 20-Something’s seemed to follow. The girls were all well dressed. With nice hair, make up and summer dresses. Low cut fronts seemed to be the norm as did heeled sandals. The guys, almost to a man, wore tight fitting, designer rugby shirts or t-shirts with some sort of cryptic white print on it, with jeans and sneakers. Sam said she felt underdressed and we agreed that it seemed easier to be a boy dressing in Brisbane than a girl. Though the guys did seem to use a lot of hair gel.

We stopped for dinner at a place called JoJo’s where they have three separate lines for different kitchens spitting out Thai, Mediterranean and Char-Grilled food at a hectic pace. Sammi got a fairly tasteless pizza and I got a chicken and mushroom crepe that was more like a cream lasagna. Luckily we were hungry.

Oh well, it was 8:30pm and time for bed.

We arrived in Brisbane on December 16th, around one in the afternoon. The 13 hour flight to Sydney and hour and half connecting flight had treated us well and we shed but a few tears for completely missing December 15th. Seriously, we didn’t have one. Come up to me and ask me if I remember what happened on Friday, December 15th 2006 and I’ll say, “I honestly can’t tell you.” Because I can’t.

Though our trip had just begun I’d already had one cultural mishap in the Sydney airport when we went to buy coffee. I’d ordered our latte’s and pulled out my wallet to pay for them when I realized I hadn’t exchanged any of my money for the brightly colored pieces of confetti they call dollars in Australia. I gave him my bank card and it got rejected, so I glumly asked the barista if there was an ATM nearby. He was cheerful enough and pointed us to one and Sam got money to pay for the coffee. It wasn’t enough to buy back my pride, however.

Our bags were almost the first ones out on the conveyor belt and we took this to be a sign of good luck. We walked outside and got into a cab. Our driver was a man in his 60’s with runny blue eyes and the red cheeks and nose of a career pub inhabitant. He seemed insanely talkative to our jet lagged minds.

After establishing that we were from the states, he told us that he had once visited Florida while he was on leave from the army back in the sixties. He didn’t come right out and say it, but made it pretty clear that his uniform and Australian accent pretty much made girls want to throw sex at him like a lawn dart. He sighed wistfully and said, “You want me to tell you the history of Brisbane?”

We agreed, mostly in fear that he’d keep up with the army stories, and he began a charming ramble of names and dates I can’t hope to remember. After a 20 minute drive he dropped us off at our hotel with the hopes that we’d, “Enjoy Brizzy,” and then took his leave.

His abbreviation of “Brisbane” to “Brizzy” is something we witnessed again and again with other words. Everyone knows that they change “Barbeque” to “Barbie”. Now that’s strange, but no more so than the fact that we American’s are either too lazy or unable to spell even that much out, giving us “BBQ”. But it doesn’t stop there. At countless restaurants and cafe’s we saw “Breakfast” transformed into “Brekky” or “Brekki” or even “Brecky” depending on the menu. And every place serves what they call a “Big Brekky” which is two eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, tomato, mushrooms and sometimes hash browns. Big doesn’t really begin to describe it, but I suppose alliteration is important in the food industry, so the general hugeness will have to be conveyed with Big. “Christmas” is shortened to “Chrissy” which I actually found rather cute. During our trip we had all manner of strangers asking us where we were going to spend our Chrissy, looking concerned that we might be out of Santa’s reach if we strayed too far. Indeed the Christmas spirit is so strong in the Aussies (another one!) that we never got up the heart to tell anyone that Sammi is a bit of a Jewwi and didn’t give a rat’s tushy about Chrissy…except in so much that her traveling companion demands many presents each year around December 25th and cries if he doesn’t get any.

The nice woman behind the reception desk at our hotel let us know that our room wouldn’t be ready, which I took as a devious and much appreciated plot to get us to the hotel bar. After we finished our bloody mary’s and something called the “Fried Asian Basket” for lunch our room was ready, which we stumbled into gratefully and fell onto the blessedly large and clean king sized bed. We looked at each other. We were here.