I spent the last week back on the Gold Coast staying again at Andy’s beach-side apartment in Surfer’s Paradise. It was a frustrating/boring week in the ABF offices…they sent the other two Americans that were out here back to the states because there wasn’t much left for the to do, not that there has been too much for us the entire trip as it’s hard to have much of an impact on a venue/event when you show up in a new town the week of the series and have to try to figure out where you are, who you need to talk to and then try and weed through all of the local politics. The only real reason I was allowed to stay is that a. I have a contract going through the tournament that I wouldn’t allow them to back out on and b. my game ops experience might be useful for the finals.
Thursday night I trekked it alone again to Surfer’s Paradise to see what kind of trouble I could stir up. I ended up hanging out with this guy and girl and went to a few of the different bars but I think without wanting to go to the real clubs it’s difficult to find too much. Friday night I went to melba’s (pronounced melbers because they like to add and delete “r’s” on a whim) it was alright but I headed to an Irish pub across the street later in the night and ended up dancing with these two girls for what seemed like 12 hours to a two-person cover band.
Saturday, I got the call that I’d be heading to Perth on Sunday so I hopped on a bus and went to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary where I saw my first live koalas, dingos, wombats and crocodiles and even got to pet a kangaroo…overall it was a pretty lame park and the Tasmanian Devil was in hiding so I didn’t even get to see compare it to the cartoon version. I remembered there was an NBL basketball game that night between the Gold Coast Blaze and the Sydney Spirit. Andy ended up scoring us two media passes and even though the Blaze are concluding a last place season, they won a high-scoring affair at 139-119 and guard James Harvey ended up scoring a franchise-record 42 points. The basketball was pretty sloppy (really just a bunch of missed layups and guys chucking up 3’s) and former Louisville Cardinal Luke Whitehead was unimpressive. The game presentation was something else though, they had really loud music blaring the whole time and the crowd of a couple thousand people were really into it. They have a courtside emcee who spends the whole game making sarcastic remarks about the other team and exhorting the crowd to make noise, which I think could get a little old but seemed to have the crowd of locals entertained (he would read advertisements while they were on fast-breaks and admonish the crowd behind the baskets for not forcing Sydney to miss free throws). All and all for a league that is failing I thought it was a good night out and really nice venue.
After the game, Andy took me on a lap of the Broad Beach scene which is a little higher end and then we headed back to Surfer’s for the “official Gold Coast Blaze” after party at the Q-Deck. The Q-deck is conveniently located atop the Q Tower which is the tallest residential building in the world at 322 meters tall. It was a pretty cool view at night and it is alleged that you can see all the way to Brisbane on a clear day (which is an hour’s drive so I kind of doubt it but it’s a nice story). We started talking to this birthday group who invited us to come out to Broad Beach with them, but we weren’t really to keen on following. I talked with a couple of them for a while and met probably the most anti-American person (or maybe just the rudest person) I’ve met so far in oz, in one of the girls who as I was saying how much fun I’ve had in Australia she was telling me, “don’t tell anyone in America because we don’t want any more of you guys coming down here”…she then tried to argue with me whether there were 50 states or 52, finally after questioning whether I could name them all and I insisted I could she said “well I bet most Americans are too stupid to know them anyway”. I told her that generalizing the personality/intellect of 300 million different people is about as stupid as arguing with me how many states there are in the union and left it at that. Anyway, we went to a few other places and yada, yada, yada we got home after sunrise (which is at like 4am because Queensland is retarded and doesn’t have daylight savings).
1 comment:
yea for koalas!
Post a Comment