Field Trip to Bulimba and New Farm Park: A ten minute under the water :)

With the Citycat just down the road, river views and beautiful Bulimba Memorial Park on its doorstep, Oxford Street at Bulimba is one of Brisbane's best streets for shopping, dining and experiencing the Brisbane lifestyle.

New Farm Park is a significant historic park in the suburb of New Farm, Brisbane, Australia, located at the southern end of the New Farm Peninsula on the Brisbane River. It covers thirty-seven acres, and it originally included football grounds, tennis courts, and basketball courts. The park also is noted for its large rose gardens, which contain hundreds of varieties of rose, and over forty thousand individual plants.

Bulimba is a picturesque inner-city riverside suburb of Brisbane. Oxford Street is the suburbs bustling retail and cafe centre with an abundance of restaurants, cafes, bars, home ware and fashion stores. The street is also home to a cinema and the historic Oxford 152 pub, which has its own micro-brewery.

Loved it! There are no other words to describe the places we visited today. The weather was splendid. I drank them all in--the impeccable sceneries, the sweet air, the blue sky, the wonderful international food and some great company.

A AU$6.90 day-pass ticket took me to a number of places downtown and along the river as many times on a bus and a Citycat (like a ferry)as I wanted. We met at the Southbank wharf to get to our first destination which is New Farm Park. We caught a Citycat and went all the way down to the park (took about 20 to 30 minutes). Along the both sides of the river are some ridiculous houses and apartments (where you have got to have big bucks to be able to afford to live),historic buildings (such as a Wool Mill company), and many sail boats. There are a couple of beautiful bridges (one of them is a tourist spot where they can climb up the bridge top to see the panorama of the city...it costs about AU$80)and picnic spots where locals and tourists go spend their time with friends and families. However, my favorite spot would be a cliff at Kangaroo Point where tourists or adventurers go climbing.

As soon as we reached the park, we found a spot close to the river and started unpacking the food we brought. One Arabic student brought a full set of BBQ equipments, seasonings, meats, sausages...you name it..he got them all. He was ready for his mission, I thought. Since I am a good cook (or at least I do believe so), I intended to offer to cook. However, as soon as I saw that Arabic student took out his cooking gloves, an antibiotic hand soup and other cutlery, I had to stepped back and just watched him with amazement! He was the boss!!! We had so much food from different part of the world. We had kangaroo steak (which I thought was not too stinky..not bad at all), boiled fish and fresh vegetable wrapped in rice paper (Vietnamese food), some cooked beef with the Arabic seasonings stuffed in a roll, a tuna dip in a Brazilian style with crackers (this one reminded me a lot of my chicken BBQ dip, which I used to once or twice during a football match while I was in Philly, and my favorite spinach (double)dip from my great friend in Philly). We even had Krispy Kreme for dessert (I even wished we had had some coffee to finish off).

Nevertheless, we had coffee alright when I got to Bulimba. Since it's a small town, so we just wandered slowly and relaxed. There are in abundance of restaurants (some good Italian ones) and small shops. We stopped at an Italian restaurant and cafe for a coffee and just a chat...During the conversation about having a family or marriage, one very story came up! An Arabic student told us about his Arabic friend, whose wife is also in the same class, making a comment about his love life. This guy has been married for about 10 years now, so one of the classmates asked him how he felt about being in a committed relationship for a long time. Looking at his wife who was starring at him and waiting patiently and perhaps anxiously for her husband's response, he said, "I have been married for over 10 years with 2 kids now, I feel like it's been 10 minutes." His wife gave him a big smile (with pride and appreciation)and turned back to talk to her friends; he said softly to his male classmate, "It's been like 10 MINUTE UNDER THE WATER!" The story had to be stopped right there since everyone, including me myself, started laughing. I thought I wished I could have stopped the moment and the day for eternity.

Later on, Annette and I went back to the city and look at some books in an American Bookstore. There, there are lots of great teaching books and I found one that my best friend Malou in Luxembourg recommended. The book is titled Teaching by Principles-An interactive approach to language pedagogy by H. Douglas Brown. I hope to get a second one since it's lot cheaper. Although I planned to go back and spend all day in a book store there. Anyway, the city was very packed with people especially on Friday night. It's a very nice city, I reckon. What a day I had!