~Life of an ordinary gal~

Australia Trip (2)

Day 2

I woke up at 7am to the sound of Zim’s handphone’s alarm and went back to sleep again. Although groggy from sleeping, I was aware that Nekki had accompanied Zim to walk to Shangrila’s hotel for his conference meeting and thereafter came back to our hotel room. I guessed that I was trying to make up for all the lost hours of sleep for the previous day. In the end, Key woke both of us up at 10 plus am, and I crawled out of bed to bathe and get ready for the day’s activity: going to Cairns Central Shopping Centre to shop!

It was pretty easy to walk to the shopping centre as the streets were simple and uncomplicated: just walk straight, turn right and walk straight down. When we reached the centre, we were feeling very hungry as we haven’t had our breakfast. Thus, we simply headed to the food court. It was interesting to observe that the food court over there wasn’t similar to us. Instead of the different stalls selling different cooked food, the food court over there had a make up of mostly fast food stalls. It was a bit tough to decide which stall to buy food from (cos wasn’t too keen on fast food and the prices were not cheap). In the end, I decided to share fish and chips plus chicken salad with Nekki. Surprisingly, the portion was large and we were rather full after we had finished the dish.

Thereafter, we went to Myers to walk since it’s one of the largest chains of shops in Australia. It was quite similar to the Marks N Spencers except there’s more variety of goods to choose from i.e. Virgin records, comestics, clothings etc. This was followed by the exploration of shops within the Shopping Centre. Key bought a pair of pants at Sportsgirl while I bought a pair of pants and a dress at Valleygirl and another store, whose name I had forgotten. We were tired after 2 hours of shopping and we decided to go back to the food court to have our tea break. Nekki and I order donuts from Donut King while Key ordered a banana muffin. Again, I observed that time passed soooo slowly again.

Key and I making funny expressions

Feeling bored, we decided to go to one of the largest chains of supermarket, Coles, to walk. We had much fun looking at the large varieties of food and we decided to buy some groceries (they were so much cheaper than back in Sg) back for supper and breakfast. We also found the cheapest bottle of water that we had ever seen so far in Australia: AUD3.80 for 1 litre of water! It was also astonishing to see that the home brand’s products were so HUGE:

Since it was a Sunday, the shops started closing at 5pm. Thus we walked backed to our hotel to rest and ate the cereals and strawberries that we had bought from Coles earlier. Again, time passes so slowly again so we decided to go for a short walk cum dinner at 6.15pm.

While having a leisurely scroll along the boardwalk at the Esplanade, we saw people having dinner at small stations. Apparently, there are several such stations with tepanyaki booths and one doesn’t have to pay any money to use it to cook! Wow, I think if these stations are built in Singapore, there will be so many people rushing to use them. Another interesting observation was that birds and humans coexist in perfect harmony over there. Birds could be seen bathing and drinking at the swimming pools while people were swimming in these pools. Plus, nobody would go and disturb the birds. It was a good feeling to see that.

People using the stations to cook foodBirds standing at the edge of the swimming pool

For our dinner, this time we had spaghetti, penne and fisherman’s basket at a food court in Cairn’s Night Market. While waiting for Key and Nekki to order the food, I saw Zim passing by with his superiors, looking for a place to eat. The food tasted not bad too, given the below restaurant’s prices. We also noticed that there were lots of Chinese or Japanese-owned food stalls at the food court. One would see that the helpers would stand in front of the stalls, trying to ask passengers to buy their food by greeting, “How are you?” and then showing their plastic containers whereby you can fill up food from a selection of dishes (buffet style) to the brim by paying AUD5, 8 or 10.

After that, we explored the souvenir shops and had gelato ice cream as desserts again. Zim came to join us after that and we decided to play mahjong in our hotel room before we called it a day.

posted by xiaopei @ 11:54 AM