We arrived late at the Brisbane airport.  There is usually a train that will take you to the city, but the last one was at 10 and we got there at 10:30. We took an Uber to our hotel, which was the same price of the train.  One noticeable difference with Australian airports is how quick you receive your bags from baggage claim.  I think we waited five minutes.  It was amazing. 

We decided to check out a bunch of free museums while here in the city.  Our hotel is located right on a pedestrian walkway, which is awesome.  We walked to city hall first.  There is a Brisbane museum on the third floor.  You can also go up the clock tower, but you need an appointment.  We couldn’t get one until 4:45, so we wandered around the small museum first.  Just like the Sydney and Canberra museums, this one made no sense either.  It had a couple of neat pieces of artwork, but it really wasn’t very cohesive and I didn’t get a feel for the history of Brisbane at all.  

I was not feeling well, so we took a bit of a break and then headed out again after lunch.  We wandered around the Gallery of Modern Art.  They were setting up new exhibitions, so I feel like we didn’t get to see much.  I enjoyed the sugar skull pile, I thought it was brilliant to use sugar, even though it depicts the deaths of Pacific Islanders.  The building was so huge with all this open space.  It was unreal. 

The Queensland Art Gallery was also housed in an amazing giant building that even had water running through it. This gallery had all kinds of different art, which I enjoyed.  

The last museum was the Queensland Museum.  This one was more like a Natural History Museum. there were a lot of stuffed animal and a special lego dinosaur exhibition.  There was an actual dinosaur exhibition too. The lego one was $29, but the rest of the museum was free. 

We were the only two people on our clock tower tour.  The elevator is original to the tower.  They reconfigured it to stop at certain floors, but she still needs to use the lever to brake.  We went to the top and then had to climb a few stairs to get the views.  We could also see the bells, but it was difficult to take a picture.  The time of our tour was right before the bells would ring.  We totally missed hearing the bells, which I don’t understand because we arrived right before and left right before they would have rung.  She also stopped the elevator so we could see the clock faces and explained that they were all connected to a grandfather clock.  There is only one guy who can fix the clock and he trained his son to take over for him.  If they need a part, he had to make it.  

Brisbane was a nice city. It was easy to navigate. It was also very clean. I really enjoyed the pedestrian streets. There was an orchestra playing outside our hotel for several hours. We could hear it in our room 25 floors up! However, we are not really city people, so we rented a car so we could tour the area around Brisbane.