On my morning walk around Brisbane the sun shone golden through the mist. And in the evening the Story Bridge and the highrises turn the world into a futuristic fairyland.

I visited Melbourne last week for work. What a vibrant and bustling city! Had a great time, plenty of good food, and the work thing went well. In the it’s-a-small-world category, I got to catch up with an Utah classmate from 25+ years ago with whom I will be working over the next year or so on a project.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures despite some nice walks and sunny days, but here’s a few.

This mural caught my eye as I stood in line to buy another Moonswatch for my friend Paul. There’s a good article about its history.

There’s tonnes of art on the streets, some more academic, some less so.

“Commit no nuisance” in this alleyway.

A couple shots from the Queen Victoria market. I bought a hat from this shop on our first trip to Melbourne in 2017. I still like the idea of wearing a hat, even more so now that my scalp is mostly exposed to the sun’s evil rays. I think I look fine in a hat. But that said, I still look at an array of zillions of styles like this and walk away with nothing quite working.

In a place with so much nice early 20th century architecture, I expected more exciting access covers than I found. The design of this little water meter cover is workmanlike if not exactly snazzy.

I got to go to the MedInfo 2023 conference in Sydney the week before last.

After all the rain we’ve had in Auckland, the sparkling blue skies were very welcome. I did get in some good walking around.

The highlight of the trip looks a lot less glamorous in pictures (since I haven’t mastered the exuberant selfie)… seeing a whole bunch of colleagues and colleagues who’ve become friends. But here’s a shot anyway… people I worked with in the Philippines and haven’t seen in person for six or seven years. It was so nice to catch up!!

And one of the conference organizers was just finishing her doctorate at U of Utah when I started there 25 years ago. She now lives in Melbourne… making the world seem small and huge at the same time.

I can’t say I miss traveling for work all the time. But it sure beats 8 hours a day on Teams calls!!

What a difference a day makes… look at that sky. Some rain came through, cooled things off and cleared the air.

This cool statue guards my hotel.

The Opera House at night.

Their lunar festival lanterns are way bigger than Auckland’s.

I got to visit Tasmania this week for a 42-hour work trip. Thanks to Bugs Bunny cartoons, it’s a place I’ve always known about but couldn’t have found on a map until moving to the region. More recently, Hobart came to my attention via this amazing article about the Museum of Old and New Art.

The 17th largest island in the world, Tasmania was a timber-based economy for a long time. Now a lot of that land is given over to (legal) opium poppies. Hobart, the state capital, is about 230,000 people, slightly less than half the population of the whole island. If NZ ever starts to feel too crowded…

The part of Hobart I stayed in had a lot of great 19th century architecture and the best collection of door knockers I’ve found since the first time I ever really noticed door knockers in France.

It gets hot in the summer, but the ducks found a way to keep cool.

And I think people also have ways to keep cool, although I didn’t get the chance to experience a Pimm’s or G&T here myself…

Altogether Hobart looks like a perfect place for a long weekend. It’s likely we’ll be working there for the long term so I hope I’ll get to go back.

I had a quick visit to Melbourne last week. It’s a big bustling boomtown, construction everywhere, lots of buzz in the streets.

There were a bunch of cool steampunk sculptures around, including this one. I turned the handle and looked through the lens, as you are seemingly intended to do. I saw something, but didn’t stick around long enough to know if I’d actually seen the point.

We turned a Thursday work meeting into a long weekend in Brisbane and had a lovely time.

About a dozen years ago, we flirted quite seriously with the idea of moving to Brisbane. The other course of action worked out just fine, but we’ve always wondered a bit about life in a sleek high rise overlooking the river. We almost got a taste of that at the Westin Hotel, where we stayed on some leftover Marriott points. The hotel was super-nice, as was the service. We enjoyed breakfast and happy hour in the concierge lounge, where we met various interesting people with stories to tell. Last night was crowded and we shared space with a couple whose summary included “I used to be in the casino game, in Macau…” We did visit the Brisbane casino, housed in the old Treasury Building, and managed to leave with as much as came in with, victory!

Now that we’re in Auckland, Brisbane doesn’t seem quite so exotic, but after spending a few days exploring (my third time, Lee’s first) we would still totally live here.

My meeting was in a nice hotel located just under the Depression-era Story Bridge, with a cool view.

We took the City Cat ferry (top picture) all the way up and down the river, a great $5 ride. Lee also took a guided river tour and shared the best parts of the commentary with me.

The Botanic Garden…

Roo-dalisque?

We took some nice walks along the river, including the South Bank that is full of attractions. Sadly, the free pool was closed for maintenance. But we did see the Peace Pagoda from Nepal, a leftover from Expo 88. The explanatory plaque says it’s one of only three outside Nepal and also says that there are Peace Pagodas all over the world. Go figure.

We ate good burgers at the Triffid, a well known live music venue. Lots of band posters everywhere, mostly unknown to me.

We saw a bunch of different neighborhoods. All nice. We especially liked the slightly funky West End, where many of the world’s gluten-free vegans seem to have congregated so they can open little shops and sell stuff to each other. We ran into a really impressive market there.

It’s a Kiwi cliché that we now believe, fresh produce is way cheaper here. Also gas. And real estate from what we saw. Hmmm, no wonder so many New Zealanders are moving to Oz.

There was a lot of public art…

That’s a scale model of the dome of a Cathedral that was contemplated for over 40 years, but finally the plans were abandoned for lack of funding.

Statues of Byrnes and Burns, two men who accomplished a lot and died young.

I hope this carving, in the very posh part of the waterfront area, is called something like To Have and Have Knot.

We did an Asian food-themed walking tour, meh. They took us to a Filipino place we’d discovered on our own the day before…

We also took in an improv comedy show that was truly remarkable in its amateurishness.

And then on the last morning, I wandered down to the finish line of the Brisbane Marathon in time to watch the winner roll in in a time of 2:33. That’s a hell of a lot faster than I could have ever run, and pretty good for a hometown white guy with a full time job. But in the running villages of the Kenyan highlands, I’m pretty sure kids that slow don’t get dessert.

I had a good time watching all the half marathon and even 10K finishers coming in… so many tales of agony and exhilaration and all sorts of other emotions on unvarnished display.

That’s the winner in the center. If he passes red shirt guy in the next 80 meters he’ll have run twice as far in the same time.

All in all, we packed in a lot and find ourselves tired and ready to go home. Tomorrow is Queen’s Birthday holiday so there’s a day to recover. But if duty ever called… a person could do way worse than Brisbane.

Got to go to Sydney a couple weeks ago for an HL7 meeting. Here’s a few shots. It seems like I always get to make a scenic approach over the Harbour.

The meeting was held in the very rarefied air of the KPMG offices.

Random morning run pictures. It was very beautiful. There are some parts of business travel I miss, for sure.

But 48 hours later… home again. And I stop missing those parts.

I got to go to a conference in Brisbane last week… what a great city to visit! Public art everywhere, parks and paths, an awesome outdoor swimming pool, fairy lights in the banyans at night, bats and birds… the list goes on.

Here’s a few pics: