An eventful two days

Lauren and I enjoyed an extremely productive Friday morning and afternoon at the Uni. After stumbling upon the office for student ID's, we continued on to get our bus passes, find our classrooms, establish a local bank account, and take a quick look around, all before lunch!

The campus is stunning. One of my favorite places so far is the Great Court, which is a large green area smack in the middle of the main loop of buildings. The architecture is great as well... even if it was lurking with spiders TWICE the size of my hand...

After lunch, we took yet another grocery trip and finished off our lists to hold us over for quite a while. It was great going somewhere on our own and finding our way around. The transportation here is AMAZING and surprisingly cheap with a student ID.

Saturday, we met up with Emily who I met shortly after landing in Brisbane (the two of us shared a taxi from the airport). All of us decided to be tourists for a day and visit the beautiful area of South Banks. After racing down the river in the ferry (also very inexpensive and we can use the same bus pass for this), we hopped off at the dock and went straight into the line of street market vendors. There was everything from clothing to food to massages, and, as you might be able to tell, I was too excited to take pictures!

When all of our shopping and looking made us hungry, we wandered until we found a fantastic burger restaurant called Grill'd. It had lamb, chicken, beef and veggie burgers, then several different styles of burgers unique to each type of meat. Bonus: they had gluten-free buns I could enjoy!

I elected to get the "Honest Hombre" chicken burger, topped with black bean chili, red onions, a giant corn tortilla chip, and fresh guacamole! I was full with the first half and supremely satisfied with the second.

We discovered that they also had one of our new favorite beers on the beverage list, called Stonewood, and Lauren got one and I sipped off Emily's. It's a rather sweet beer with a floral and fruity flavor (I have never described a beer like this before). Perfect on a hot day.

Afterwards, we walked and digested along the boardwalk then ventured over to the pedestrian bridge.

The suspended bridge has the illusion that it is rocking or tilting to one side because of the angle of the supports. Across the river, on the other side, was Queen Street mall, which has over 700 shops! It's a wonderful outdoor mall with everything you could imagine. We even stumbled across the bar we visited on our first night out (not the RE) and where we initially discovered Stonewood beer.

Our final stop was at the artificial beach in South Banks, where we took off our sandals and dipped our feet for a while before getting back on the ferry.

The rest of the day was spend relaxing and I took a short run before dinnertime. I took a different route this time and encountered a lovely view of the city from atop the hills of the suburb St. Lucia. Dinner was a hash with brown rice, sweet potato, eggs, spinach, carrots and more. I dipped a Weet-Bix square in my sunny side-up egg and found it to be delightful :)