Brisbane: part two

A wedding anniversary trip continued.

Japanese Restaurant

We decided to go to a Japanese restaurant for dinner. This was the restaurant we went to for our first anniversary. Being heavily pregnant we (I) decided against the sitting on the floor, and had Teppanyaki instead.( About two days before I had Jimmy we went out to dinner at a restaurant with fixed bench seats. I couldn’t fit – and we had to move. Very embarrassing.) Anyway we thought it would be nice to recreate the first anniversary night, without the pregnancy. The food was nice, but not spectacular. The problem was ….. dinner for two – two courses plus two beers and one lemonade - cost us just over $120. This is approximately ¾ of our weekly grocery budget for five people. I couldn’t in all good conscience enjoy the food knowing how that money could be better spent. It was nice, but it just wasn’t special enough to justify spending that sort of money.

Talking about it on the walk back to our hotel we decided that no meal is really ‘worth’ that much. And it wasn’t just that restaurant. Most restaurants would cost that much - add a bottle of wine and dessert and it would break us! Another disappointing aspect for the meal was the fact the restaurant used paper napkins and disposable chopsticks. That disappointed me on two levels: environmental, and aesthetically. When I spend so much on a meal I expect a cloth napkin and proper cutlery. And by cutlery here I mean proper chopsticks, not disposable chopsticks in a paper bag. I think the disposable bits really drew attention to the fact we had spent a lot for not much. It was the coffee in a paper cup thing all over again, but on a hideously expensive scale. Oh well. You live and learn I guess. I had fun on the walk boring Matt with discussions on how stupid it is all the high-rise office buildings were lit up – some seemed to have every light in the place on. So we got back to the room……

(Use your imagination here)

My big sleep in and the most stupid invention ever

……I had planned to sleep in. I wake up with the sun. I.e. about 5 am, or earlier in summer. We don’t have daylight savings in Queensland; something about the extra hour of sunlight curdling the milk in the cow’s udders and fading the curtains. During the week Matt needs to get up at 5am to walk to the bus-stop, and Moo is always up with the sun. On the weekends Matt sleeps in, but Moo always manages to wake me up anyway, and if she forgets, Jack starts whining to be let in …or the kookaburras start up, or the chooks……for whatever reason I am always up at the crack of dawn. So I thought it would be nice to sleep in for a change. Wrong. Some fool had set the alarm clock (on loud) in the room for 5am. Not being particularly alarm clock savvy. I managed to hit the snooze button, and 5 – 10 minutes later it started again. The snooze button must be the most stupid invention ever. What is the point of setting an alarm for earlier than you need to get up…if you are just going to delay it anyway?

pig trough

So that was it. A ten minute sleep in. Nice. I can never get back to sleep in the morning. So I got up at 5.10 am and made a cup of coffee, and read our complimentary copy of The Australian. We could have got a copy of The Courier Mail, but it is written at a grade 8 level (so I believe) and has about 2 columns worth of information in what seems to be 1.5 kilos of newsprint. The Australian usually has something worth reading, and we don’t buy newspapers so it was quite novel. Matt eventually dragged himself out of bed, and we went down for the buffet breakfast. I am not a huge fan of buffets, or food courts in shopping malls, which we call Pig Troughs. If anything would be guaranteed to make me lose weight it is seeing people chowing down at an all you can eat joint. But this was actually quite nice. Cold, but nice. We realised after we had served ourselves some cold hot food that the reason it was cold, was that the foodily challenged customers were not closing the little doors on the steamer thingy the food was in. The staff were running around closing them after people, but obviously when we got there the lids had been open for a while. Anyway it was tasty cold bacon. The fruit and yoghurt section of the buffet was lovely and I had a delicious selection of fruit – stuff that I never have for breakfast at home, usually because I can’t be bothered to cut it up.

A drive

We had planned to go shopping in the morning, have yum cha for lunch in China town, and a movie in the afternoon, and an early dinner out again before picking up the kids from Mums that night. Trouble is neither of us like shopping. And there wasn’t a movie we wanted to see. And we were still reeling from the cost of dinner the night before. So what to do……we actually contemplated going home and hanging out without the kids, but decided that was just too lame for words. So we went for a drive across the border to a town called Urbenville, near Woodenbong and Kyogle. We had been there a few years ago and there was land for sale, so we thought we would check it out again. It is a 2 hour drive from Brisbane. Lunch was a couple of very tasty and properly made steak sandwiches ($10) from the Urbenville shop. Saw the land, liked it, want to buy it. Drove home. Had dinner at home, I cooked. Got the kids. Went to bed. Got up at 5am when Moo said – ‘the sun’s up in my room now’……..