SILENCE!

Yesterday, my friends, was the much-awaited Market Day. I joined about a million clubs. It was pretty fantastic, but ultimately not very exciting to write about. Instead, I'm going to write about what I did last night.

First I went to a bar called the RE, with Eike and two of her friends, Philip (Germany) and Beccy (England). It was this large, open bar with a roof and no windows, and there was an old guy in the corner playing acoustic covers of about every mega-hit from the 80s that he could think of. We'd been there for about half an hour when Emil flounced in with a group of kids he'd met at a dance class, one of whom turned out to be another friend of Eike's who she'd been trying to get to come. Emil was very excited about having learned to salsa, and he showed me the dance step he'd learned, and I promptly trounced him at it. Engineers, you know--they just can't dance.

There were about forty various exchange students at the RE because it was a QUEST event, so I met some girls from Brazil, a girl from California, and a dude originally from Australia who was raised in Miami, who was intent on getting me to join the wake boarding club. I told him I'd consider it, but frankly I think the Brisbane River is not somewhere anybody should be swimming. It might mutate your eyeballs into ping pong balls or something.

Around 11, once the RE had lost its charm, we swam to the Regatta hotel, with Eike and Philip complaining the whole time that it was winter and therefore suppose to be dry, and it was all my fault for bringing Seattle weather to their tropical paradise. Yeah, it was raining that hard. But we made it to the Regatta, where the most amazing thing was going on: silent disco.

You went into the back room (called "the Regatta Boathouse"), and they handed you a set of radio headphones, and you put them on and danced to one of two different DJs both performing in the same room. It was fantastic because you could control your own volume, you could take the headphones off if you wanted to talk to someone, and if you didn't like the music on one channel, you could just change to the other one. The best part was whenever a really good song came on the channel you weren't listening to, and you'd hear all the people around you start singing along to it, and then you'd have to switch channels really quickly to get with the program. The best one was when "What Is Love?" by Haddaway came on, and people just went nuts.


We left the club around midnight, and since the Brisbane public transport system is absolute shit, we ended up taking a taxi home. This is really stupid, since technically my house is about half a mile away from the Regatta, but directly across the river. You have to go all the way west to Campus, or east to the downtown area where the bridges are.

Today I have one class, and then a lot of time to kill until 7 o'clock, when I'm going to a snow party. Yeah, you heard me. Snow party. In Brisbane. We'll see....

Much love,
Morgan

P.S. I feel like I complain about the Brisbane transport and navigation systems a lot without ever justifying myself. So, in validation of my whining, I give you this test:


This is a perfectly average Brisbane street sign. Now say, for a moment, that you needed to go down Hardgrave (the street in question). Based on the information from this sign, which way would you go: straight, or right? Have a guess. I'll tell you the answer later.