A Night Out On The Town

On Saturday evening our little girl had her first ever sleep over. Mrs BobinOz and I were so distraught that we decided to go into the city to console ourselves with beer, wine and food.

As I am sure I have mentioned before, we kind of live out in the sticks. But even so, getting a bus was easy. We are just minutes walk from the bus stop which takes us right into the heart of the city. Two adult returns cost us $13.

It’s incredible to think that we have been here for nearly 2 years and yet this was the first time we’d been out to the city, in the evening, just the two of us. We’d been up to the city at night time with our daughter before, for example to see the Brisbane River fireworks or to see the Christmas decorations get turned on.

But this time we could actually go into pubs. So we did. Our first “pub” was the casino.

Brisbane Casino by day

But we were there at night.

Bearing in mind that my wife and I have the distinction of having visited Las Vegas for three days and not wagered a single shilling between us on anything, we hadn’t gone in there for a bet. But we had heard you could get food and drink. So we took a look inside.

Inside

We were impressed! Nice decor, four or five bars to choose from and food if you wanted it. The beer prices weren’t bad either, a glass of sparkling wine was four dollars and a pint (not a schooner) of Stella Artois was $6.90. But we decided not to eat there and went searching for food in the town.

We whittled down our choices to a Chinese restaurant, a Wagamamas noodle bar and an Indian. We ended up in the Chinese and our meals, more than we could both eat, plus two drinks each, came to just over $90.

Fully fed, we decided to go back to the bars. The nearest and liveliest turned out to be an Irish pub. The pub was teeming with people much younger than us, (much, much younger) although I did spot one other guy in there who I truly believe was older than me! Unfortunately he left, leaving me with the dubious honour.

You do have to hand it to the youngsters out here though; they were all dancing and having a whale of a time. The pub was massive and we decided to venture upstairs. Imagine a big Victorian house with 10 bedrooms; well that’s what this pub was like. And each room upstairs had something different going on. There was a line of around seven or eight people doing the conga from room to room.

And it was only half past 10!

At 11 p.m. we decided to head back to the bus stop.

Brisbane City Bus Station

Getting a bus back was just as easy with buses running every 15 minutes up until 11:15 p.m. with a one hour gap before the final bus departs at 12.15 am. The bus station was clean and quiet, there was no graffiti and the bus was on time. We were home by midnight.

If you do want to stay out much later, as I have on a few occasions, then a cab home in the wee early hours of the morning will set you back around $60. A useful option as most of the pubs in the city stay open till three or four o’clock in the morning.

Back in England, we used to go in to London occasionally for a night out as we were only a 30 minute train ride from Liverpool Street station. But then of course we’d need to get a tube from there to go somewhere a little more exciting. Getting back always seemed to cause problems, delayed trains, tubes no longer running, can’t get a taxi and more often than we liked, a bus service instead of the train due to maintenance.

Getting in and out of Brisbane was so much easier and of course, the city is much more compact. We really enjoyed it.

We are already looking forward to Elizabeth’s next sleep over.