In the Lap of Luxury

Ah! The joys of a private shower! Ah! The splendour of personal space! What could possibly cause these paroxysms of joy? Why, dear reader, Glen and I have temporarily cast aside the communal living arrangements of hostel life and indulged in the rental of a more upscale place.

We decided that our last two nights in Australia would be spent in a nice hotel. As we need to catch the train to the airport at 6:30 on the morning of November 2nd, we wanted a hotel that was in easy walking distance of the CBD main train station and transit centre. After much hunting around for a hotel and consulting the tourist information booth in one of the major outdoor malls in the Brisbane CBD, we landed upon Abbey Apartments, a hotel/apartment building featuring completely self-contained apartments geared to business travellers. The location couldn’t be better – it is literally across the street from the train station, which will allow us to roll out of bed and stumble to our airport train with minimum time and fuss. The rate was very reasonable – a heck of a lot better than the Holiday Inn hotel that is attached to the train station. And really, I prefer the apartment setting. The building still has a pool, hot tub, and sauna, but now we have the niceties of single-bedroom apartment sized space, and a full kitchen. We were able to simply move all our groceries right into the apartment fridge, and don’t need to blow our budget and guts eating all meals at restaurants for two days. To add delight upon delight, this apartment has in-suite laundry washers and dryers! I shrieked with happiness when I asked the receptionist how much the coin laundry cost and she told me that we would have our own laundry facilities and washing powder in the room. I’ve never been so excited to do the laundry, but I suppose that is what you get after nearly two months of hostels.

We checked in as early as possible – in case you are curious, it was at 10:05 am, precisely ten minutes after we checked out of the YHA hostel (which is only two blocks north of the apartment building). Basking in the glorious privacy of our little suite, Glen and I started the day with some lazing about, computer games, and cable television at a moderate volume. After a while, we wandered down to the CBD outdoor mall, went souvenir hunting without much luck, and purchased groceries for lunch. We came back to the apartment for a leisurely late lunch (how’s that for alliteration?) of kangaroo steak, pasta, peas, and Aussie shiraz. The steak was to die for, I sincerely wish we had picked up kangaroo steak earlier into our holiday and ate more of it. We went for a soak in the hot tub, made a brief evening excursion to find some Hallowe’en bar action. Finding no action of interest – Hallowe’en here is not a big event, so the party was basically just louder-than-normal music and a few guys taking the opportunity to cross-dress – we went back to the hotel to eat salad, bake cookies, and drink Australian wine.

The wine in question is well matched to supermarket just-add-egg-and-butter cookie mix. At this moment we are finally slugging back the strawberry wine we purchased in Tasmania. It smells like strawberry jam and has a liqueur like taste to it. It goes down very, very smoothly and I could easily see a gaggle of women getting hammered off it at a hen party. It is delicious and extremely sweet. I honestly didn’t expect it to be this good! You can’t drink a lot of it at once, as it does get rather cloying, but it is unmistakably strawberries and I’m quite enjoying it. There is also some free entertainment occurring out on the street below our apartment balcony. There is some sort of altercation out by the train station, with a few young fellows running around and train station guards shooing them away. The Paddy Wagon just drove by, and the guard directed the cops to where they could pick up the young rowdies. The Hallowe’en parties at nearby bars must be ending, as there are a few drunks weaving their way past our building. It appears that most of them are drifting up to hostel row, which is not surprising.

As you can tell, we are more than enjoying our purchased moments of privacy; we are positively basking in them! And we have another full day of privacy basking, a nice trip to the art gallery and museum in the early afternoon, and an evening at whatever South Bank restaurant strikes our fancy for our last meal in Australia. Then it shall be off, off to New Zealand!

See you there!