Buses: A documentary

On the weekend I went shopping with the college girls at the West End markets (the Grey Lynn-type suburb of Brisbane) which was amazing, lots of good purchases, and I was introduced to iced-tea = best thing ever.

I then bused to visit my family who live in Redlands. I discovered that an hour and a half on a bus can give you a lot of insight into a place. I concluded that Australians are ruder than New Zealanders (this I already had suspicions about given the majority of the staff at Cromwell College).

Incident One: Two teenage girls jump on and don’t have their student ID cards or enough money to pay adult fares. The bus driver won’t let them on. Fair enough. The girls roll their eyes and make up lame excuses. A man behind them ends up giving them money. Nice guy. They give the money to the bus driver, who gives them change, they then walk off without thanking the stranger who gave them the money - with his change!! They yell obscenities at the bus driver on getting off.

Incident Two: A lady with a pram jumps on the bus. Some twelve year old girls are sitting on the seats that fold up. They clearly don’t understand they should move (and there is no sign to say they are the pram seats – in fact the only sign says, “those with prams should take care not to inconvenience other passengers” = terrible – sorry if my having a baby inconveniences other passengers grrrrr). Anyway the lady starts yelling at the girls who still don’t get it, until a lady near them finally explains that those are the pram seats – they immediately move. What I don’t understand is how people can be so rude to strangers. If she had just explained she needed them to move, they would have, instead she immediately started making a scene. I think it’s the heat.

After my eventful bus trip – there were lesser events on there too! - I hung out with the family. They have a pool, we played guitar hero and had a picnic. Good times. My cousins are cool.

This week Daniel was here from Melbourne and it has been such a treat. Caught up with him and Dave and swam and sauna’d in his flash hotel. Good times!

Have been meeting heaps of nice people in the Psych department but am finding it way too hard to get any work done as it’s too hot in my room and there’s too much fun stuff to do. Really need to get cranking as I realized with all my travel I’m not actually here very long.

Off to Canberra on Friday and unfortunately my flight is at 5.30am and the latest time I can bus to the airport to get my flight is 7pm tomorrow (Thursday) night. So it’s going to be a nice long sleep in the airport. Lucky I’m amazing at sleeping. Very excited to see Max.