In the Hive.

Place: Gold Coast, Brisbane, Australia
Stayed in: Watermark Hotel, Surfers Paradise
Date: 26 to 30 Aug 2010
Travelled by: Singapore Airline

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We were off work by 4pm on thursday to catch the flight at 9pm for Brisbane!! Our rather long awaited trip! I caught 3 movies - The Back-up plan, Shrek Forever After and Iron Man 2 (haha, yes again). Yiling & I had wines so that it could put us to sleep but just find it difficult to sleep upright. Hence, she read books as I continued watching the movies & listening to the music. & when we were about to fall asleep, the plane landed. Still wide awake, we reached Brisbane airport at 7am to meet Scott, our driver aka tour guide. We had a crash course on Brisbane city. We went to the Wheel of Brisbane as Scott talked non-stop about the only thing nice in Brisbane was the climate~ We had a walk in the city hall. After which, we went to their Chinatown to have dim sum for lunch (totally not nice but we were to hungry). After lunch, we went to mount nathan for wine tasting & sheep feeding. We had our photos taken to be part of the wine label. Most of the wine require mixing with soda so i just got a small one for souvenir sake. Next, we moved on to Harbour Town to have some shopping. We were excited to get good deals but after 2 hrs of speed shopping, nothing bought! The prices werent that attractive afterall. We finally checked in to Watermark Hotel at 6pm. Our room was facing the sea & Q1 building :) We put our luggage and had a walk around surfers paradise. Call it workaholic or what, we spent quite a bit of time in their supermarket! haha, it was more than the time we spent shopping. We had dinner at the legends chinese restaurant. Just felt weird to keep having chinese food in aus. After dinner, we went to the friday night market, along the beachline. quite number of stores with their own creations.It was quite cold with the strong wind. around 12 degrees perhaps. We were all so tired after a long flight & staying awake for 38 hrs!! We zonked out at 11pm.
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The 2nd day, we woke up at 7am and went to the beach for a walk/stroll, after having breakfast at Waves. The beach was beautiful & it was already filled with surfers. The cold sand & water was refreshing. Observing at the seagulls, watching the surfers & listening to waves. Nice start for the day! We went to movie world after that. We watched Shrek 4D. hahaz, it was quite fun with the water splashing at you when shrek sneeze, the actual feeling of spiders crawling on your feet & the motion of the characters. We went on the stunt driver show. They were good! amazed at how they could control the car so well & act at the same time. There were explosions scenes, parallel parking act & motorbikes as well! We had a buffet lunch whereby most of the characters appeared in the restuarant for photo-taking! yippes! but no sight of daffy & tweety! argh. Harry Potter shop was disappointing. I had ice-cream while walking around the world. We took the wanted photos (6 of us suddenly only worth $240k), get the coins, did funny actions & watched the parades after that. I did quite abit of shopping there. After the movie world, we went to this outlet that sold lots of macadamia nuts! We bought quite a bit of things there. We had dinner at Hard Rock Cafe. Only the ribs & veggie burger were edible. haha. We went more walkabout that night and headed to the Casino in Jupiter Hotel which was 10mins away. rather crowded on a saturday night. The night ended at 11pm.
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The 3rd day started with us waking up at 5am to catch the sunrise by the beach. from pitch dark to the rays of sunlight emitting from the clouds, we waited. It was terribly cold at that unearthly hours. Despite that, we had a good & relax time at the beach before heading for brekkie. We set off at 9am to west tweeds head (new south wales) for catch-a-crab cruise! As we were too early, Scott brought us to point danger. The view was great. It was almost directly opp of surfers paradise. There were even more surfers riding the waves. Janet, Yoke Cheng, Yiling & I made a common wish at the wishing well (but din come true...haha) We began the cruise by feeding the seagulls & pelicans. There were so many of them. The river was still, surrounded by greens & birds. We were taken to a shallow part and started our yabbies pumping activity! hahaz Yiling and I got 3 yabbies & 1 snail. The yabbies were meant for fishing bait. It took me a lot of patience for the fishing part. haha i din get anything but yiling caught 1~ We went on to catching the crabs! The crabs were huge & they cooked for us immediately. The oyster was fresh (normally, i dun eat but that was really too fresh for me to resist). After which, we had buffet lunch at the seagulls club. All of us were too full to eat much but their apple crumble with ice cream was great!! We went for Superbee farm after the lunch. Normal Bees live for 7 days whereas Queen Bee lives for 7 years. Reason being, Queen Bee eats royal jelly!! After the bee farm, it was f&e until seafood dinner at 7pm. We went to Woolworth supermarket, walking the aisles repeatedly! Happy with our supermarket shopping, the seafood dinner at Waves was good! Fresh juicy prawns & nice curry mutton!! Not wanting the night to end after dinner, Kim Song, Kim, Janet & I headed to Q1 building (77 floors) to get nice night view of gold coast but to our disappointment, the last entry was at 815pm. Sigh. We headed to the crowded part of surfers paradise & went to Avenue pub for an australian beer before heading home the next day.
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The trip was relaxing & a bonding time for the marketing team.
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1st Sept was offsite meeting at The Pines country club for 1 whole day. Stressful but glad it was over. The roasted lamb there was good!
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Now my direct boss is leaving next week... feeling lost & sad... :(