Gold Coast, Brisbane

Gold Coast:
We were scheduled to stay at the Gold Coast for 3 days, although there is not really that much to do there. It would have been nice to spend the whole time relaxing on the beach, but it is much
too windy to spend any time there. On Monday and Tuesday we did not do much but relax at our hotel and occasionally eat kebabs and soft serve. The streets are fun to walk at night; I was particularly tickled by this store, "Condom Kingdom." It's from the new school of sex shops that, along with DVDs and toys, sells gelato in the front of the store like so many of the shops in Italy. I guess their business model really works though, as there are two of these shops on the main thoroughfare in Surfers Paradise. Maybe this is just a strange part of town because I there are also a lot of places where people can dress up as cowboys and take olde-timey sepia-tone pictures in a mock saloon setting. Lauren and I once passsed on and saw a family all dressed up: the father was a sheriff, the mother some sort of whore worked at the Inn (see: Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood). I forget what the children were.

Brisbane:
On our third day we decided to rent a car to drive up north to Brisbane. When we arrived, we parked at the museum because it was $12 for the whole day. This was fortuitous as it started raining as soon as we left the parking structure - we could simply peruse the free exhibits while waiting for the rain to stop. It was truly our lucky day because Brisbane has excellent museums, which we did not realize beforehand. Initially, we had thought that there was nothing of interest in Brisbane, but only went to check it out and get away from the Gold
Coast. Although there was an exhibit on American Expressionism on loan from the Met, I don't really understand that stuff too much so I wanted to head to their Gallery of Modern Art. I was worried about spending too much time at a museum because my parents don't really like western art and always ask me what the pieces mean. I was relieved to find that the main exhibit at the the GoMA was The China Project, which "explores developments in contemporary Chinese art over the past thirty years." A lot of it was about the legacy of the cultural revolution, which my parents could relate to. I really enjoyed some of the pieces, like this expressionist calligraphy, "The Universe Is Within Our Hearts,"

Lauren really liked this one, I forget what it was called:

We both liked this piece, "Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared," which was made by igniting gunpowder on the canvas to imitate the stylized dragons found in ancient Chinese art. Cool huh?
After the museum, we walked around the city center a bit, but it kept raining which it prevented
us from seeing too much of the city. Before we drove back to the Gold coast we stopped at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT, cyooooot, "cute," get it?), whose campus is surrounded by a Royal Botanical Gardens. We fancied ourselves photographers for a moment and used the macro feature of the camera on this cool flower we saw, which I leave you with.