Lazy Weekend

We are only a couple of weeks away from our trip to Melbourne and we are both feeling like the vacation needs to start RIGHT NOW.  It might be the weather, as it is either raining and hot, or dry and hot...both with high humidity.  Both situations make it very easy to stay inside or just sit in a cafe all day, so we have had to really push ourselves to get out and about on the weekend.

When we first moved here we took the City Cat (the public transit service that runs along the river) all the way down the line.  We passed the Portside area, where cruise ships dock, but have never gone back.  We decided to walk through the neighbourhoods that are close to Portside and see a new part of Brisbane.  The neighbourhoods were lovely but most impressive part of the day was seeing the ferry terminal.  The ships that dock here are enormous!  We have no idea how big the ship is, where it was going or from where it came, but there seemed to be literally a couple thousand people milling about.  If we ever need to catch an ocean liner, now we know where to go.

Passenger ferry docked at Portside

We also try to visit the weekend markets whenever we can.  These markets pop up all over the CBD and suburbs and they are incredibly popular.  It is pretty easy on a sunny Sunday to wander through the markets and browse the day away, and clearly there were quite a few people with the same thing in mind.

Sunday Market

The most interesting part of the weekend was a lucky educational moment that we had while cutting through the Science Centre (it's shady, air-conditioned and right on the way home...what more could we ask for?)  We learned that the gender of turtles is determined not when the egg is fertilized but by the temperature the egg is at while buried in the sand.  For eggs up to 28.6ºC, the turtles will be born males, for eggs in nests that are at temperatures over 33ºC, the turtles will be born female and for the temperature range in between, anything goes (maybe little turtles with alternative lifestyles).  There are upper and lower limits to the temperatures, of course.  It pays to take short cuts through museums!