YOUR MOM's a cultural ignoramus.

Hello, hello, hello! It's been bloody hot and humid this week, and the evenings are almost worse than the days because you just feel disgusting and clammy, so I've pretty much shut myself in my room. Although, to be fair, that probably has more to do with the fact that I am currently drowning in papers than it does with the weather. Seriously, Australian midterms are awful. It all just sort of...crashes down at once. Not awesome.

But, at the moment is it raining, which has made me substantially happier, and I've decided to surface from the depths of academia to give you a report on what I've been doing over the past two days (other than getting really depressed by the topic of my history paper: genocide).

So no, I haven't been the most diligent student and instead took the last two evenings off to do fun stuff, which is probably bad for my academics, but great for my sanity and for you because I have awesome things to report!

First of all, Friday evening I met up with my friend Julie (remember her from the Moreton Bay Research trip?) and we went to a restaurant in the CBD that she loves. It's called "the Pancake Manor" and it's exactly what it sounds like: a restaurant, dedicated entirely to pancakes, 3 meals a day. It was amazing what creative things they came up with. They had chocolate pancakes. Not pancakes with chocolate in them, but actual chocolate pancakes made with chocolate batter.

Julie warned me against those, however, saying that it was a bit like eating an entire chocolate cake on your own. Instead, I ordered the banana & chocolate ice cream pancakes, which were still so incredibly thick and overwhelming that I could only eat half of it. Julie got strawberry and chocolate, and we each topped it off with a shake. Mine was spearmint, which was delicious at first, but wound up tasting a bit like toothpaste toward the end, so I didn't finish it, either.

Once our stomachs were sufficiently bursting with pancake goodness, we trekked across the bridge to the cultural center to meet Aran for a poetry slam hosted by the Brisbane Public Library. I didn't participate in the slam, but Aran did and he did so beautifully, the MC was endlessly entertaining, and there were a lot of other awesome poets there, including a guy named Myles Something (help, Aran?), the spoken word duo Emily XYZ & Myers Bartlett, and these guys:

You can't tell in this picture, but that guy has an awesome ruffle over his butt.

The crowd was deliciously snarky, the judges reasonably objective, and on one occasion an audience member got so excited about a performance that he stripped down to his boxers, gave a mighty "YOWP!!!" and ran out into the street. Once the show was over, Aran and I wandered up to West End in search of coffee, but were ultimately thwarted in our quest, and instead settled for bottle coffee and stick ice cream, which we ate sitting outside the same little library I used for my internet connection when I first arrived in Brisbane. In the hour and a half we spent hanging out on the bench, we made several friends: an old man picking up trash for his shopping cart who though I was Irish and Aran was Jewish, a rather large bat that had a go at the back of Aran's head, and a very drunk man in dress trousers and a button-down shirt, who wandered up to us excitedly, brandishing an opened package of smoked salmon, and earnest announced, "I love smoked salmon! And it's bloody cheap! Only $5!" before stumbling away up the road. Delightful.

This evening, there was an event going on in South Bank called "Riverfire," which is a yearly thing where there are fireworks and a fighter jet does a fuel dump over the crowd. I wasn't 100% on going because I've seen fireworks and I've seen fighter jets and I had a lot of work to do on my paper, but Emil called me up and insisted that it was going to be the coolest thing to happen in Brisbane all year, so I met up with him and Aran and Scarlett (and later Binte and Laeka) at the cultural center, where we secured a place for ourselves sitting on top of a barrier wall at the bus stop.


Ultimately, Emil was right: it was pretty freaking cool. I would try to describe it to you, but I would fall far short, so instead, here's a video, even though it really doesn't do the event justice either, because I didn't get any footage of the fireworks coming off of all the buildings downtown, too:




So that was my weekend. Coming up next: history paper due Monday, cinema paper due Friday, and then I'm taking an awesome trip with the QUEST kids to the hinterlands to see a waterfall and some glow worms! So stay tuned. :)

Much love,
Morgan