Our second day in Oz

I got up at 4:30. I had already planned to do this because I wanted to be in Fortitude Valley to watch the Liverpool v AC Milan Champions League Final. Someone had told me on BritishExpats.com that I’d be able to find at 24/7 Sports Bar in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane which would be showing the match.

Having never been to Fortitude Valley before I wasn’t fully sure where I needed to be but I looked all around there and could I heck as like find a sports bar that was open. There were a few restaurants that were open at that time in the morning, strangely enough, but no sports bars.

I quickly jumped back in the car and headed back to Cath’s as I new it was being shown on terrestrial TV on SBS. Why didn’t I just get up and watch it on the telly in my wangers in the first place rather than venturing into Brisbane in the middle of the night trying to find a sports bar! It was about a 20 minute drive back to Cath’s so I searched the radio waves trying to find a radio channel where I might be able to listed to the match while I was driving. I did find a channel, but unfortunately the commentary was in Italian. I couldn’t believe it, I was in Australia and the only radio channel that I could listen to the match on was in Italian!

I was pretty pissed off (with myself) but I figured that at least I’d make it back to catch the second half. However, I had made another fundamental mistake. I had assumed that we were 10 hours ahead of the UK as last time when we visited in January, but I didn’t take into account British Summer Time. So we were in fact only 9 hours ahead. Meaning I got back just in time to see AC Milan score their second goal 10 minutes before the final whistle. Liverpool lost and I went back to bed. I’m strongly considering following Aussie Rules football from now on!

Later that morning we went into Brisbane CBD (Central Business District (city centre)). I opened a bank account with Bank of Queensland. This was pretty straight forward and only took about 20 minutes, as opposed to the 40 minutes it took when I went into Worksop to close my Barclays account before we left the UK. We also went to a Starbucks where I got online and applied for a Tax File Number for me and Rach. A TFN is like a National Insurance number in the UK and is needed for everything in Australia. We also had a quick search for rental houses and wrote down a few numbers to arrange a viewing for the following day.

Cath made us a lovely meal in the evening with an obligatory bottle of wine. We were still jetlagged though and in bed asleep for 9pm.