Day Seven 21 February 2010 Markets

Started the day by going out to Rocklea to visit the Brisbane Markets. It was quite small. Vicky was a bit disappointed that we'd managed to go through the hour market in less than an hour.

In the afternoon, we went to Events Cinemas Myer Centre to see an advanced screening of the new Sandy Bullock film, The Blind Side. It was pretty good.

For dinner we went to the Norman Hotel. It was a steak bistro near the Gabba and apparently is renowned for it's steaks. Queues were long as was the wait for the meal. Still feel that the Meat & Wine Co. is vastly better.

That's our first week in BrisVegas done and dusted.

Day Six 20 February 2010 Soy Custard

We started the day in a mad rush going from house inspection to house inspection.

One of the places we had already visited earlier, but hadn't been inside for a house inspection was on our hit list. When we visited it earlier in the week, a young Indian couple were moving into one of the apartments downstairs. We asked to check out their place and it gave us a pretty good idea of what the upstairs apartments would be like. Hence when we went to the inspection on Saturday morning, we had already filled in all the paperwork for the application ready to hand in if the place checked out. It did and we handed in the application there and then. The realtors approved our application that afternoon and now we have a place in Annerley (south of the Brisbane River).

As soon as the realtors told us we were successful with our application we stopped going to inspections and went home. Vicky was pretty tired from the full on morning of inspections and went for a snooze.

That night we went to Sunnybank for dinner with Vicky's Uncle and Auntie (her Dad's older Sister) as well as her Cousins. We went to Landmark Restaurant and it was all right.

After dinner Vicky's Cousins took us to check out a dessert cafe called Just Soy Cafe. Was a bit shocked that they called sweet tofu by the interesting name of "Soy Custard".

Day Five 19 February 2010 Miles per hour

More house hunting around the River City.

For some reason, there are a lot of 'Adults Only' shops in this city. Each major suburb we visit seems to have one.

We went grocery shopping at Coles in West End (around the corner from where we live) in the afternoon. Somehow, we managed to spend over $70.

Later in the afternoon, we checked out the gym in the Mantra.

Tried the treadmill, which was fine except the setting was in miles.

Thought I'd start off slow at a 12km/h pace (5min/km), but that was actually 12miles/h (3:06 min/km). For a minute I thought this is terrible, I'm really struggling here and it hadn't even hit 9. Once it was over 10 (which was actually 16km/h or 3:44min/km), I started to think something was definitely wrong. Started reducing the speed and noticed that it was displaying miles per hour.

Settled down to a 8miles/h pace (4:40min/km) for the rest of the run.

We tried to go to Subway for dinner, but it was closed.

Was a bit shocked, haven't been to a place where Subway is closed by 7pm.

Day Four 18 February 2010

Didn't do much other than househunting.

We even checked out an apartment block that used to be an aged cared facility. It was pretty well done up.

Had lunch at a place called Miss India in New Farm. Butter chicken was really good and the naan was made fresh to order in a tandoor oven in front of us. The naan was huge and I suspect that there are a lot of medium pizzas out there that would struggle to provide as much of a meal.

Also went for my first run in Brisbane. Started at 5:30pm (still struggling to wake up before 6am in the morning) at the Boardwalk Bar on the North Bank of the Brisbane River and followed the river out to New Farm and back. The session was organized by Galeforce Running and apart from the session coach, Lew, I was the only person that turned up. Seems that the River people don't like to run in the evenings. Can't blame them as it was bloody windy. Anyway, we pretty much jogged 800m and walked 200m for most of the session as Lew, who is a triathlete, did a morning bike session earlier. He was also recovering from some sort of foot injury and he recently turned 69 years old. All this meant that when we were running, it was only slightly faster than 5:30/km pace. Still a run is a run and it was nice to stretch the legs.

Day Three 17 February 2010

Not much happened. The weather bounce back up from it's low of twenty five back to around thirty degrees again. The downpour of rain provided almost no relief to the humidity.

We went house hunting around Morningside, which is south of the Brisbane River, but in the east.

Finished the night by walking into town and watching a movie at Events Cinemas Myer Centre. We saw Law Abiding Citizen, which stars Gerald Butler and Jamie Foxx. It was an all right movie.

It is nice that the prices of movie tickets are a bit cheaper than Bleak City.

Day Two 16 February 2010

We went out to Toowong and the surrounding suburbs to look for a new place to rent.

It was still pretty warm and a little overcast.

Picked up some rent listings from the realtors in the area and then went to a food court in one of the shopping centres to check out which places we wanted to visit.

We make our way out of the shopping centre to find that BrisVegas had been hit by about 50mm of rain in half an hour. There was flash flooding all over the little River City and car traffic was cactus for the rest of the day.

At night we had dinner with Brian (Vicky's Cousin) and his wife, Nancy.

We went to a Vietnamese place West End.

I ordered a combination hor fun (aka flat rice noodles) and they brought out chicken cashews.

It was the house special, so thought okay, well this must be pretty special, never had cashews with hor fun before. Spoon the dish into my bowl expecting to find the rice noodles underneath, but didn't find any. Apparently, the waitress had given me the dish for the table adjacent to us.

No harm done, but the woman on the adjacent table spat the dummy.

Didn't really make any difference, she still had to wait as they prepared her dish again.

Went back to Brian and Nancy's after dinner.

They have an insane DVD collection. Layer upon layer.

Problem I find with having DVDs is that I never find the time to watch them.

Day One 15 February 2010

We arrived in BrisVegas ahead of schedule at 12:05pm. We had to wind our watches back an hour because we surrendered daylight saving at the New South Wales border.

Temperature we was well over thirty degrees. The weather forecast had predicted late showers, but they did not arrive.

We went to a cafe on South Bank for lunch as the small carrot cake with frosting (about the size of a cupcake) that QANTAS served was insufficient.

The place that we're staying in is quite nice. For some reason they charge per minute for Internet usage. We walked into the city to find a TLife store and purchased a pre-paid wireless broadband USB key.

Somehow, I managed to fall asleep before seven o'clock at night. Might have something to do with not going to sleep the night before. Had a good sleep though.