This weekend didn't go quite as I planned it. On Friday I was supposed to see Surfers Paradise. On Saturday I was going to experience the big concert at the park. Today I was going to go to the shoreside markets nearby. Oh, and tomorrow I'd planned on going to Moreton Island for a real holiday thing.
Friday I dragged myself to the central station and found out that a ticket costing around $20 would get me to the city of Gold Coast several km's inland from the beaches and the famous skyscrapers of Surfers Paradise. Had I wanted to travel between 3:30 and 7 PM it would've been closer to $30. Add to that the bus fares from the train to the shore, I didn't like the price of this trip. It would've also taken around 3 hours of travel to get back and forth to go to the sixth biggest city of Australia I knew nothing about and I felt dejected. I had no real interest in the area except for the q1 the world's tallest residential building. Getting a great view of a city with a historical name like Gold Coast didn't seem like worth $30-50 plus three hours of travel.
So, I hung out at the bookstore and remedied my Chuck Klosterman addiction for free.
I started Saturday by going to Fortitude Valley to check out the open air markets. Either I didn't find them or Chinatown actually is in Fortitude Valley. But it was raining and I wasn't going to buy anything anyway so I decided to take a longer walk back to the park where the concert was held. I stopped to look at 38 years of Australian Rolling Stone covers at a gallery on the way. I also took some nice pictures of the city in my way over Story Bridge.
When I got to the park, I was on the wrong side and there were a lot of people. Too many of them were of the annoying and noisy type. My suspicions had already been raised earlier but I wasn't sure until I got to the entrance. The concert wasn't free. Besides, it was sold out anyway.
I finished the book I was reading though and practically saved $36.
Today I hung out at the book store trying to save some money and totally forgot about the markets. I just forgot I had planned to go. I also put off the booking of tomorrow's trip that it was fully booked by the time I got around to it. Tuesday is my last day here and I was supposed to get ready to leave then, while tomorrow's weather forecast was much nicer. But I might have to do a lot of stuff tomorrow so I can go to Moreton Island on Tuesday. If the weather is nice enough.
Needless to say, I've been a little bored. I even watched 17 again at the hostel's TV room/mini theater. I've also been anguishing on the proper spending ways of my yet to be earned travel budget. In order to buy new stuff, say more shirts so I can do laundry only every two weeks I will need more space, which means I'll need a bigger backpack. And once I have that I can start buying more stuff like DVDs which I can send back home. But my little brain isn't used to being deprived of multimedia and my iPod has only 180 minutes of unseen video material, so I've come to yearn something that some people might deem useless or vain. I wan't a portable DVD player...
I'll let that sink in.
At first I was dreaming of a mini laptop, which would handle some of the things my iPhone can't do. But then I found at that mini laptops DON'T have DVD drives. Which makes them weaker than iPads with better choices of web browsers...
Now my mind has been wrestling between the pros and cons (I even made a pros and cons list) of a cheap laptop that I might bring home with me and a portable DVD player. The downside of a cheap laptop is that I really want to get a GOOD laptop, maybe a Mac, when I return to Finland. An extra laptop is a distant dream that shouldn't get in the way of experiences in Australia. Plus the advantages over my iPhone are: DVD playback, better keyboard, better web surfing (not faster though). That's it. All I would need it here for is the DVD playback.
That's where a portable DVD player could come in handy. It would be a lot cheaper than a laptop (pro), it would be smaller (pro and con), it might satisfy a need (pro), it'll probably be useless after this trip (con).
At the moment I'm leaning toward a portable DVD player, which would be like a $2-300 rental of something to entertain me until it breaks down or I leave. Seems more reasonable than using at least two or three times as much on something that won't be any more essential to bring back to Finland. What I've yet to find out is the battery life of these kind of devices. I also don't have money to throw away at the moment either so until a month or two it's all moot anyway. Plus by that time I might be able to enjoy myself with less multimedia anyway so we'll see. Just wanted to illustrate how bored I've been, dreaming about spending the money I don't have.
Now it's bed time and three nights until I fly down to chilly Melbourne to make some of my dreams a reality. If I do go on a trip to Moreton Island I will be sure to update you, at least with pictures.
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