I slept horribly my last night in Byron Bay. Went to bed at 10:30pm, but was woken up by the girls in my room coming home from drinking at 2:30am. Then I couldn’t go back to bed. I just laid there until around 5:30am, when I decided to at least go online and get some things done. I trying to figure out how to apply to the university I want to go to in Bolivia. I think I will have to call them, but I haven’t received an email back yet, and there is no information on their website. Anyway, I left Byron Bay at 7:45am Friday morning (and since the hostel locks the fridges until 8am every day, I had to leave without all my refrigerated food, sad), at and got into Brisbane at 10am (although my watch said 11am, apparently some of the Australian states have day light savings time, and some do not).
I only had one day in Brisbane, but I had a great time! I started off by going to Lone Pine Zoo, which was awesome! It was about a 45 minute bus ride from the city, but it was worth it. Highlights: petting kangaroos and holding a koala! I never realized how adorable koalas were until I was up close and personal with them. They have cute little faces, really soft fur, and a pleasant eucalyptus odor. They are dense little guys though, definitely heavy than I was expecting. There were also wombats, Tasmanian devils, reptiles, birds, and dingoes. I had never seen a dingo before, but it looks just like a dog. Identical as far as I could tell. I was a little startled when I saw it actually, I didn’t understand why a dog would be in a zoo. I wanted to keep him. After the zoo, I took the bus back to the city and walked around an area that had a lot of museums and parks. It was already 4pm, so I just had time to go to one of the museums, and I chose the Modern Art Museum because I had never really seen much modern art. GOOD DECISION. I found out I like modern art! Probably a large reason I enjoyed it was because every piece had an explanation by it (both the adult explanation and an explanation for kids, which was also nice, and simple, at times). When you understand what the artist is trying to convey, it’s a lot more fun! Also, many of the pieces looked extremely time-consuming, which is very impressive in a way. Even if anyone COULD have created the art, most people would not take the time to take what looks like hundreds of thousands of stickers to create a huge Buddha (which was to show how commercialized Buddha has become). My favorite was a taxidermied moose that had been covered in glass balls of different sizes. It was supposed to have something to do with pixels and the blurring line of real and not real… I just thought it looked cool! And the glass balls magnified the moose hair to different degrees, which produced an interesting effect. After the museum closed I went for a walk through the park. At one point I was eating some Subway and reading my book and I saw a German couple that I had already seen 4 different times before in 4 different cities in Australia. Crazy how that happens. Then at night I just hung out at the hostel and had a few drinks with 7 crazy awesome Irish kids (wish I had found them for St. Patty’s day!) Haha, at one point they were singing Irish songs as loudly as possible, half because they wanted to and half because it annoyed the English kids in the next table. Good times.
Came to Noosa today. I was going to go on a beach walk through a national park, but I was so tired that I took a nap instead. I’m going to go explore now though, and probably do the walk tomorrow before my bus ride.
