Australia day #4 - South Bank Parklands

We are having so much fun! How could we top Lone Pine? Well, maybe we can't top it, but we sure had a great day at the South Bank Parklands. It's right downtown on the river and we got to ride the train to get there, not because it's far away but because it's hard to park. There are so many great things to do. There's a big ferris wheel, which we didn't go on (much to the chagrin of Pierce, Mattie, and Zoe). There were a few museums that looked great. We went in the Gallery of Modern Art. We looked through the exhibits and there was some cool stuff. I liked some of the aboriginal art. I should have taken some close-ups of these sculptures because they used some cool household implements.



Such a great view of the river, this was the 2nd story looking down (or 3rd story?).


Zoe had so much fun with Sydney and Oaklee! I loved seeing the girls together.


Annnnnnndddddd there was some art that I didn't love as much. I did like this series of pictures, they were giant, took up the whole wall, but don't look over to the right, because there is a disturbing movie of nude guys running around, yikes. We moved on quickly.


There was a music section with like 20 metronomes in a row, all clicking away. One thing I liked was a set of tape recorders (cool, I remember those) next to a set of virtual tape recorders with lots of different Mozart recordings. You could put on headphones and listen to as many of them at the same time as you wanted - more wasn't necessarily better but it was interesting. Then there was this giant guitar statue - since Zoe is a budding guitar player we thought she might like to pose with this. (But - do not touch.)


And Sydney, and blurry Pierce.


Downstairs was a great children's section. They were doing a project with spinning collages they had made.


Zoe thought the art museum would need to keep her art (because that's what I told her because I didn't want to carry it around all day). So here is a picture of her art. Also - she loves to cut hearts out of colored paper. And, as it turned out, she got to keep the art after all, and we even brought it all the way home with us, the museum said it was okay.


The cool kaleidoscope blocks were fun for Pierce and Parker, who didn't too much want to create the art.




The children's room kind of made my eyes hurt, but it was fun.




Next stop - some great lunch. Mattie and I had kabobs, which were delicious. Matt had fish & chips and Pierce had a burger, Zoe mac & cheese (of course, doesn't matter where we are, she always orders it and then doesn't want to eat it). Then there were a series of pools along the river. The first one was a normal pool and the second one was a beach! How cool is that, a man-made beach with nice clean pool water. Right behind us, and across the river, is downtown buildings. But here is the beach!


The girls had such a nice time making Zoe into a sand mermaid.


Since it was bright and sandy out, she wore goggles while the girls created the sculpture around her.




I half thought she had fallen asleep, she was holding so still for so long. I bet she was in the sand for half an hour.


A beautiful and artistic mermaid emerged!








It was a shame to break her mermaid, but....


the next mermaid was Parker. I don't know if he knew it would be another mermaid, but he was also very patient.




The water drops created the scales on the sand tail.


Look at their delight in the mermaidian fun.




Pierce was in charge of the hands, and he wasn't as detail oriented as Mattie.


What a good sport!


After the beach park there was a really nice spray park too. Matt and I walked around park area - it's a really nice riverwalk with parks, restaurants, a marina museum, and some great big bridges across the river, even a pedestrian-specific bridge. It goes really far too, we didn't see everything. It reminded me of how cool the riverwalk was in San Antonio, only the Brisbane River is much larger than the river through San Antonio and the whole scale was just bigger.

Then we rode a train to Chinatown for some Thai food. First we stopped at a store where we saw this very surprising picture in the store window:


Hmmmm.

The plaza we went to was really nice and the Thai food was great. I remember I took a picture of the menu to remember something, but I've kind of forgotten what it was. Maybe it was the fat rice noodles - Zoe loved them.


See how happy she is? She shared my dinner and kind of took it over.


One funny thing is that they don't worry about ice, the drinking water can be warm. We were happy to have water we could get ourselves, we were all thirsty by then.


So fun to spend time with our friends! We loved doing and seeing so many interesting things today! Thank you!