Saturday marked the beginning of Brisbane Festival, which is basically just three weeks in September with a bunch of random concerts, theatre performances, etc. semi-organised throughout the city. The real exciting thing was the fireworks display to kick it off Saturday night, known as Riverfire. Met up with Taylor and Megan at South Bank and we decided that we had a pretty good spot right where the City Cat stop was. We were promised an aerial show at 5pm but unless one helicopter appearing for about 2 minutes is something to get excited about, it was pretty lame/nonexistent. So we chilled on the waterfront for another couple hours waiting for the fireworks and watching the area fill up with people thousands of people.
Eventually 7pm rolled around and any doubts that the show wouldn;t be worth the wait vanished instantly as a F-111 jet flew overhead and performed a "dump and burn". Basically the F-111 has its fuel tank located behind its afterburner so literally the jet dumps some of its fuel which is ignited behind it in a gigantic stream of fire! People complain about it being wasteful (which it most certainly is) but I have to say it was freaking awesome to see this jet all of a sudden disappear into a gigantic fireball cruising through the sky! Supposedly this will be the last "dump and burn" performed in Australia as the F-111s are being phased out of their air force and its also mad expensive/wasteful.
Then began the actual fireworks, accompanied by a soundtrack. Not sure if I'm just that much of a country bum but I had never seen fireworks that were actually synchronized with music so between having just seen the flying fireball and this new novelty I was already blown away. Every public event in Australia is begun with an acknowledgment of the "rightful land owners", the Aboriginals, so the first music that was played was a beautiful Aboriginal song. Very nice and all but I couldn't help but be amused by the irony considering it was following a performance that consisted of burning fuel and blowing up tens of thousands kilograms of fireworks over a river. Thanks for the land guys, we're gonna go blow some shit up over it k? The comparisons to America never end!
But in any case, the fireworks display itself was easily the best fireworks show I have ever seen. There were 6 barges (3 of which we could see from our spot) shooting off fireworks from the river, fireworks being launched from the bridges crossing the river, and even fireworks being launched off the tops of the skyscrapers downtown! The F-111/ball of fire cruised around at different parts as well. Best free entertainment I've had here/possibly ever.
Afterward we realised that getting onto the City Cat back to campus was not going to be easy as we'd thought despite being right next to the stop. There were literally thousands of people waiting to get on and the system wasn't even running because apparently the river had become clogged with people watching the fireworks from their boats. So after about 40 minutes of indecision, we decided to fight our way through the crowds and get some food since it was after 8pm and none of us had had dinner. Taylor had remembered some pizza place so we grabbed that and chilled in the grass. This is only the second or third time I've had pizza here but I have to say, it sucks. Apparently Australians don't believe in sauce and there's just something about the pizza itself that just isn't great. It confuses me because the Australians I've talked to get excited about this chain called New York Slice which sells good old American pizza. So why they don't just all make good pizza, I have no idea.
The next morning, Taylor, Maia, Megan, Liz, and I got up earlyish to check out the "French" Sunsupper Breakfast. Basically we were pumped for a free breakfast that wasn't at college. We got to the Goodwill Bridge where it was being held and got excited because they were giving away free water and we were all really thirsty. Little did we know that it wasn't plain water, but in fact sparkling water. There was a big line for the food and I had had to go to the bathroom for some time so I volunteered to take all 7 of our bottles (we'd taken a few extra, we were THIRSTY) and dispose of them while they stayed in line. Didn't find any recycling or rubbish bins on my way to the portapotty so the people to go in after me were probably pretty confused by the bottles that were taking up half of it! The event itself wasn't quite as cool as I'd expected but was still good. Basically the gave out free croissants, strawberries, yogurt, and cheese, had some really good sidewalk chalk drawings of French places/paintings, and we bought some crepes (decent) before making our way back to college. Spent the rest of day doing homework, woohoo!
Monday brought the usual class, homework, and our last two basketball games. Got our butts handed to us by International House which was a bit demoralizing as they're not usually good at sports but apparently that wasn't the case for basketball. I had contemplated going to the gym between games but ended up staying for the ladies game, GREAT DECISION! It was their last game and they didn't really have anyone who was good or had played much ball before and they were fully aware of it. So they instead decided to just have a good time with it. Memorable quotes included "IMA GET ALL UP IN YOUR GRILLS!" (Bounty jumping around like a crazy) and my favorite came from the ref, "Foul is on... Giz!?" That put me in a good mood for our next game against Kings (one of the all guys college's), which we knew we were going to get spanked in whether we liked it or not. Was a little worried at first because we had mysteriously lost some players and were down to four. Then Kplus showed up to save the day so we had a whopping five players, one of whom didn't even know the rules. Despite this, we held our own and played a decent game.
One final note, My pics from Riverfire and the dump and burn didn't turn out too well but I recommend just doing a youtube search. It'll be well worth ten minutes of your day to check them out a bit!
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