Weekend in Brisbane (July 19-20)

It was a really lovely weekend in Australia.  I woke Saturday very early, and watched the sunrise from my apartment window. Here's some pictures though I don't think they really do justice to the view.

After an early morning run, I went back to the apartment for coffee (I'm getting better with the French press, but I still really miss my Keurig.)  I had no plans, so I decided to use Google to see if there was anything happening in Brisbane, and sure enough, there was! The "Regional Flavors Festival" was on for the weekend, just a short walk down and over the river on the South Bank.  The festival was entirely free and open to the public, so I decided to go figuring I could grab something to eat and see a little more of the city once again. 

The weather was perfect once again, a cool breezy sunny 65, as I made my way over to the festival.  I stopped to take a few pictures on my way over the Goodwill bridge, and I could already hear music coming from the South Bank.

The festival was huge, and it spanned the entire park.  In several areas, there was live music playing, and there were tents everywhere, selling food from the local restaurants, spices, nuts, chocolates, ice cream, cheese, wine and produce from various regions around Queensland.  I wandered around for a bit along the riverwalk first, and happened upon the local pool, beautiful and open to the public - there were a few folks in the water and sunning themselves, and I took a few pics before moving on:

My first stop at the festival was the "Eat, Drink, Show" tent. Here, various Australian celebrity chefs were doing demonstrations.  I caught a demo by a chef named Miguel Maestre from a program called "The Living Room."  He was extremely funny and entertaining, and he demonstrated a paella that smelled outrageously good and churros (which will always make me think of my brother Peter and his family, and our wonderful adventure in Disneyland).


By the time he was done, I was starving. I headed over to where the food booths were, and it was quite crowded.  I walked through the wine tents first, and wished Jeannie and mom were with me; we would have had a blast tasting our way through that section. But before I wanted wine, I wanted to eat.  It was hard to decide, but I finally chose "Super Butcher", in part because they were serving Australian-style food, and in part because they had such a long line I figured the food must be good, and it was.  I had a pulled pork sandwich - but it wasn't like the southern bbq pulled pork you'd get in the states.  The shredded pork was really well seasoned, but there was no bbq sauce or vinegar; instead, they poured a smooth sweet apple sauce over the pork; the sandwich was incredible!  To wash it down, I went back to the wine tents, and chose to buy a glass from O'Reilly's vineyards, since I'd been to their Rainforest the day before.  Again, good choice, and note to self - the 2011 O'Reilly Cabernet Sauvignon is excellent.

After wandering around for hours, and resisting the urge to buy bags of really delicious looking chocolate, I decided to head back to the hotel.  On the way, I took a little video of the street crossing buttons/sounds I wrote about the other day. 

Sunday was fairly uneventful.  Another beautiful morning river run, followed by Church at St. Stephen's Cathedral.  Before I left for Australia, Uncle Jim Duhig told me that many of the Duhigs settled in Brisbane (my mother's family name is Duhig, to be clear).  One member of that family had become the Archbishop of Brisbane - James Duhig. For this reason, I was particularly interested to go to mass at the Cathedral, where this very distant cousin had once been the leader of the diocese. 

The Cathedral is very modern inside, though of course I didn't take pictures in Church.  I was curious to see if attending mass in Australia would be different, and it was - in three ways.  First, they sing. A lot.  A lot more than we sing. I'm not a fan of the singing, and I think we sing a lot, but they sing more.  A lot more.  Second, there's incense. A ton of incense. Incense when the priest enters, incense when he reads the gospel, incense during the consecration, at one point the altar server steps out into the aisle and releases even more incense.  Not a huge fan of incense either, just to be clear; my head was pounding by the time mass was finished. The third difference is that there are no cushions on the kneelers, just really, really hard wood. My knees were screaming early in, and although I saw that quite a few people stopped kneeling fairly quickly, I felt the need to prove myself by hanging in there and kneeling right up until the very last possible moments.  I'm not sure what I was trying to prove, but I left church with bruised knees, and a pounding headache.  And that's Catholic mass in Australia.

After church I wandered a bit more before coming back to the room to get some work done.  I wandered through the botanical gardens - until now I'd only seen them from the river side.  There are more pictures below - Brisbane is truly a beautiful, beautiful city.