Partying in Brisbane

Well, it’s been a while and we’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do. The main reason for the lack of blogging activity is that we’re both working, which is a bit of a drag…Life has settled down and our gallivanting days are over, but it hasn’t stopped us from having a good time here in Brissie…There always seems to be something going on and we have been making the most of living life in the city.

Brisbane likes a good party. It seems to have a festival every weekend and if there is no valid reason to have a festival then someone makes up a valid reason. Next week, for example, is ‘Queensland week’. This celebrates Queensland’s succession from New South Wales 146 years ago and will require lots of people to have lots of parties including a ‘Wear Wool Day’, where presumably people party whilst wearing sweaters, and a dinghy regatta - partying with boats…

The seafood and beer festival sounded like a very valid reason for a festival so we turned up on a really hot day to find a whole street filled with beer stalls and the occasional unenthusiastic vendor of fried calamari and chips. The emphasis was definitely on the beer, but it was really great. We did eventually find some genuine seafood sellers and, thanks to the persuasion of Lisa, ate our first oysters, which were gently seaey and nice. The rest of the day really focused on the beer element of the festival and we eventually retired to a 24hour pancake house for something sensible to eat.

Last month we were really excited to hear that there was going to be an 80s street party on Brisbane’s South Bank and spent the day trawling the charity shops of the valley for something suitably horrible to wear. We arrived all dressed up to find out that, alongside our crazy friends, we were the only people over 15 who had turned up in costume. Still, Matt rocked the place with his green double-breasted jacket with roll-up sleeves and stone wash jeans and we had a good boogie until we realised that we were the only people old enough to realise that they were not actually playing 80s music at all. When Hot chocolate ‘You Sexy Thing’ came on we’d had enough, but discussion with the 14 year old DJ amounted to nothing and we retired to the bar. The rest of the night went pretty smoothly until another 14 year old came up to me and told me reassuring that he could tell that I was in fancy dress, I thanked him realising suddenly that the other 200 odd people I had seen that night might have thought that I usually spend my Saturday evenings in cerise raw silk off-the-shoulder numbers and heinous blue eye shadow….

We‘ve also been indulging in a bit of culture, including our first opera and a brief brush with ‘avant garde’ pianists; Now call me old fashioned, but I’ve always found it much nicer when pianists play notes which come together to form music. Also fairly high up on my list of ‘things pianists should probably do’ is use their fingers to play the notes. These guys started out by looking like they were about to converse with higher forces or imminently turn to the dark side and then played a lot of notes very, very quickly all together It sounded like the kind of noise that would be very sharply followed with a cry of: ‘Billy get off that piano unless you’re going to play it sensibly!’. The high point came when they started playing with their elbows, which was our cue to leave the building.

We enjoyed a slightly more sensible evening of cabaret a week later which began with a stunt violinist – literally a guy wearing a jumpsuit, PVC cape and a crash helmet playing the violin (very well) whilst linked by ropes to his friends who were his counterweights. Occasionally they would jump, sending him soaring up to the roof. At one point he was playing Vivaldi Four seasons upside down with his head a couple of inches off the ground – it was brilliant! We also saw Rhonda Burchmore, Australian TVs answer to Cilla Black, only pretty and with amazing legs, who sang a whole heap of love songs including ‘Fever’ and ‘My Funny Valentine’, it was great.

Our day at the races was a resounding success at curbing any gambling problems we may have been harbouring. We managed to successfully lose every single bet that we placed even though we spent ages reading the little book that tells you all about how the horses have done in the past, what surfaces they have run on and what their favourite colour is. Our friends, on the other hand, bet on horses like ‘Easy girl’ for no other reason than it sounded a bit rude and raked it in all day…. We still had fun drinking champagne and watching horseys run past us really fast…

If there’s one thing that the Greek festival was going to deliver it was good food! The adverts promised 500 kg of haloumi and 100,000 honey puffs so we were gutted to find out that they’d sold out of haloumi half way through the second day. Still the dancing was good; we tried a spot of Zorba dancing, but our efforts were pathetic compared to the record breaking dance of over 3000 people the night before.

So as you can see, Brisbane is keeping us happily entertained, I’m just off out to buy myself a woolly jumper for next week…