Brisbane

Today, we awoke bizarrely early again in order to cadge a lift into the city with Brad. This mildly backfired, as he needed to pick up his brother on the way and his brother had been coerced into babysitting duty. Thus, we stayed at his brother's house for an hour or so watching the tennis.
Anyway, after a while, we headed into the city proper and arrived in Brisbane, the air heavy with prospective rain that never came, but with a humidity of 89%, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were swimming regardless.
We took a stroll through the city centre, wandering around looking at all the buildings made up of dusty red-gold stonework. We found the Botanic Gardens (which we seem to magnetically locate in every city) and admired the giant lizards sunbathing on the rocks and shivered at the slimy eels gathering at the edges of the ponds. We took some touristy pictures to document the lizards and then carried on to Old Government House. We walked down to a mangrove boardwalk and saw some truly horrific looking red and yellow spiders the size of my palm hanging in the trees. After staring at them in terrified fascination for a good five minutes, we nervously picked our way down the centre of the path along the riverbank, skin crawling. We continued down the river for a while and then turned back into the city, returning to the central precinct in order to have a cool drink and people watch. We sat, with large frozen fruit juices in front of us and a brownie/custard slice for good measure. While we munched and sipped and had brainfreeze, we watched all the people go by. Some were wearing crazy balloon hats from a vendor up the street a little, others were in the height of fashion. It was very interesting.
We took a look around the Myer mall, looking at all the things for sale, but we got bored pretty fast as we can't actually buy anything much due to packing and monetary restrictions. We went to City Hall and sat in George Square, laughing at the need to relocate City Hall when the building in front of us was so obviously perfection for it.
We found a store I visisted last time I was in Oz, called 'Skinnys'. A place for Australiana and sheep skin products, I caved to the forecasts of -11 degrees centigrade at home, and the millions of pictures of snowy landscapes crowding facebook and purchased a new pair of slippers in order to try and keep myself warm when we return home.
Then, content with my buy and after an amusing diversion in a geographical store involving mouldable figurines, we managed to locate a bus service that was headed in the right direction, caught it despite being 10cents short of the ticket price (thank-you Mr. Bus Driver) and were picked up by Ansie at the bus stop.
We have just enjoyed our third restaurant quality meal - homemade buckwheat pasta with roasted garlic and tomato sauce with olives and parmesan...Now, for sleepytime.

Thanks for the comments! We shall try and get some pictures up and in the blog asap. In the meantime, check out our Flickr gallery. :)