Clearly all I needed to do was moan and complain about the weather and someone would listen. As I walked out of the internet cafe I walked into sunshine -- not pure, not a cloud in the sky sunshine but it was sunshine nonetheless. The change in the weather allowed me to feel like less of a bum and explore the city a bit. Brisbane will never be on the same level as Sydney (not even close) but it is a nice little town. There's a nice pedestrian mall similar to Pitt St. in Sydney that contains mostly souvenir stores (not as good) but also is crammed in the middle with nice restaurants and pubs (a nice improvement on Sydney). If you cross through the pedestrian mall and over the bridge you get to a nice little section of town called South Bank. There's a nice walk that goes along the river and passes some restaurants and open park space. The highlight at the end of the walk is a manmade beach called the lagoon that gets absolutely jam-packed on the weekends. Brisbane also puts on a whole series of markets around the city during the weekends. I went to Eagle Markets with Sam (the English guy who I've been bumping into all along the East Coast) on Sunday -- the markets itself were nothing special, but it had a nice backdrop along the river.
That night I didn't bother venturing out of Birdee Num Num's (the hostel bar) to the main nightlife drag on Brunswick St because I learned my lesson from the night before and I had a good group of people to hang out with. Plus the hostel (which I dubbed the Captain Planet hostel because the floors were labeled Earth, Wind, Fire and Water and reception delivered the love -- their words. It makes perfect sense for Australia to love the show anyway because I've never seen a place -- North Carolina included -- so thoroughly embrace a good mullet) supplied me all the alcohol I could possibly want, simply for running a stack of their brochures to my hostel in Hobart. Free alcohol aside, it was a great night. I hung out with Sam and the whole group of seven or eight people we had built from roommates and other people as well as two Swedish girls, Bea and Adaleine, who were in my room in Byron. All the days and nights were more or less spent the same way in Brisbane. Walk around for a while in a different part of town during the day, get back for the pool competition at 3, play free pool for the rest of the day, eat dinner, debate when we should start drinking, start drinking. Although this sounds like nothing special, by the final day I didn't want to leave.
Alas, early Tuesday morning I left Brisbane and all the people I'd met along the East Coast for Hobart, Tasmania. Partly because it's Hobart, partly because my hostel is crap, things have slowed down considerably. Hobart itself is a really nice town. For one thing, it's not nearly as backpackery as the other places I've been in Australia, so it feels like the most authentically Australian town I've been in. The city is lined by a nice waterfront where most of the pubs and restaurants are located.
Central City Backpackers, though, has given me my hardest challenge for meeting people. The common area is large but arranged terribly for socializing -- there's a TV room, where everybody is too busy watching, and a bunch of couches where people sit around and read but not a single place to set up a card game or even just a circle to sit around and chat. It was a full day before I met anyone and those conversations were started around the "So have you not met anyone either" premise. And that brings me to another reason why I wouldn't recommend the place to anybody. Thursday was Australia Day, the nation's equivalent to Independence Day. Like in the US, Aussies use it as an excuse to not work and get pissed. Since backpackers like to throw themselves into the local culture, we were more than happy to not work and get pissed as well. The only thing was, nobody in the hostel knew what to do. When I asked at reception what I should do, the girls working at reception (the one highlight of the place -- all of them are exceptionally friendly) remarked that a lot of people had been asking the same thing. Since I mentioned that I had met nobody since I had been there, I told them they should organize some sort of pub crawl for everyone in the hostel to kill two birds with one stone.
Unbelievably the owner of the place put the keibosh on the idea shortly before we were set to leave because he didn't want his workers socializing with clients or some sort of bullshit like that, making Central City Backpackers the first hostel to neither promote nor facilitate the mass consumption of alcohol, and if anything do the opposite. We (two English girls Sarah and Laurelle, a Dutch girl Mendy and myself) instead wound up at another hostel, the Pickled Frog, which was putting on a barbecue and selling cheap drinks at its bar. They even went so far as to grill up sausages just for us and give us the discounted drinks. And that is why I have no problem giving them some free publicity on this spot. After leaving the Frog we went on a little pub crawl on the waterfront area called Salamanca until about 2 (or a full 12 hours after we started). Along the way I wound up meeting a girl who lives about 20 minutes away in New Jersey. You never know where you'll find them
Saturday morning I took a wander over to Salamanca Markets, the one thing Hobart is really renowned for. The best markets I'd been to in Australia had been in the Rocks, the historic district of Australia, and in terms of size and inability to walk at a pace faster than geriatric, Salamanca wins in a blowout. Like a standard market, they had stalls ranging from jewelry to books to clothing to food. And it was the food stalls where Salamanca came up woefully short. The whole idea behind these markets is that you can show up and not worry about lunch as you move from one free sample to another. Sadly, few of the stalls delivered. These people have to understand that just because I don't want to buy their food doesn't mean I don't want to eat it.
While the markets were a nice way to spend the morning, I was lost for ideas on how to spend the afternoon or evening. As I said, the hostel is very dull. At least tomorrow I embark on a week-long (or so) road trip around Tasmania, which if the postcards I've seen are any indication, should be amazing. Plus I'm sharing the car with three German girls, which shouldn't be all bad. Unless they decide they're bored of English.
Cheers
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