Down Under Day Six

To start our first full day in Brisbane AUS, we descended to the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel for our complimentary breakfast. Unlike the all-you-could-eat continental breakfast we were privvy to at the Sudima Hotel in Auckland, the Ovolo the Valley hotel in Brisbane only offered us a single meal and a beverage, chosen from their limited menu of options, very few of which were fully vegan (although several of which were veganizable). I chose a fruit bowl with an assortment of fruit and some vegan yogurt (which is spelled yoghurt here), with coffee as my beverage choice. I also added on a side of tofu scramble, for protein, and a green smoothie. It's possible we'll be charged (aka, nickeled and dimed) for these add ons when we check out, but it is what it is. Deborah got a muesli bowl, which also had fruit and vegan yogurt, with a green smoothie as her beverage choice. It was a decent breakfast, despite the portions being a bit skimpy.

After breakfast, we took a walk up the road a few blocks from our hotel to check out a plant based hot dog stand that our travel agent had shared with us. It wasn't open when we got there, but a nearby coffee shoppe was, so we ordered some beverages (soy hot mocha for me; iced oat chai latte for Deborah), and by the time we had finished those, the hot dog stand was open. The hot dog stand was not exclusively plant based as we had been led to believe, but it did offer many plant based options, and we ordered some of said options on the electronic ordering menu boards beside the stand. Despite the technology, the very human person working the stand managed to f**k up our order, forgetting one of the plant based hot dogs we had ordered. We did not discover this until we were back at the hotel and it was too late to do anything about it (despite Deborah having her doubts about the accuracy of the order when we received it, which I erroneously dismissed, largely because I was in a crappy mood due to still fighting a head (and increasly chest) cold).

Most of the rest of the day we spent poolside at the rooftop pool of the hotel. They also had a sauna next to the pool, which I indulged in with hopes it might clear up my chest cold. It very well may have helped eventually, but I was still feeling pretty crappy, so we sought out another chemist (aka, pharmacy) and got me some more OTC meds, including a Robitussin-like cough medicine called "Chesty Cough," a moniker I loved because it was so perfectly descriptive of the malady it was purported to alleviate!

We also found a grocery store and scored some fruit, nut milk, corn chips, and hummus, as supplemental nutriment.

Unsure what to do for dinner, and it being a Friday, although we did not care, because we were on holiday, we chose a nearby Italian restaurant to try, mostly because they were willing to accommodate our vegan way of eating. It was satisfactory and the staff were very friendly. As we were leaving (with boxed leftover vegan pizza, because the portions were non-skimpy) the owner/manager bent our ears for what seemed like an egregiously long time.

We returned to the hotel and slumbered, but not before I polished off the leftover pizza.

Fin.