10 Things to do in Brisbane..

Hey there!

Here's another list of recommendations for backpackers or budget travellers searching for things to do in the great city of Brisbane.

- Australia -

Part 10: Brisbane

Most backpackers start their journey either in Sydney or Brisbane and then make their way up north to be astounded by the beauty of the Australian east coast.

As I've already published an article about Sydney giving advice on what to do in the buzzing metropolis of New South Wales, I thought I should also write one about Brisbane, since I spent most of my time there when I travelled around Australia last summer.

Brisbane can make anyone happy, no matter their interest. If you love art, you'll find a place to be inspired by Australian and international artists. If you like exercise, you'll find a place to run as far as you like. If you like learning about different cultures, you'll find a place to broaden your horizons.

So this is a list of wonderful things to do in Brisbane and while you're at it, also check out my recommendations for Sydney – here.

1st visit the Botanic Gardens and Mount Coot-tha. If you're looking for a place to look over the entire town of Brisbane, maybe watch the sun set with your loved ones or if you're just interested at exploring the great flora of the garden or the Sir Thomas Planetarium that is located in the garden, this is the place to be.

2nd take a tour on the CityCat or the CityHopper (it's for free) to gain a first overview of the City of Brisbane. Go all the way to Kangaroo Point to look at the amazing cliff (you can also go climbing there, if you're more of the adventurous kind). Hop off at the terminal Riverside or Eagle Street Pier and have a look at the great skyscrapers and luxurious restaurants, e.g. Pony. 

Unfortunately I couldn't afford a meal at the Pony restaurant this time, but I went to a different restaurant of the same owner in Sydney a few years back and absolutely loved it. It's definitely not cheap, but it's definitely delicious..

3rd go for a run (or walk) along the riverside, start your exercise at the campus of the University of Queensland in St. Lucia and make your way to the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens and the historic centre of Brisbane. It's for free and your body will love you for your motivation!

4th visit West End and check out the food market at Davies Park (open every Saturday from 6am - 2pm) and the Boundary Street Markets (open every weekend). You'll find creative shops, delicious street food (also check out my recommendation for Planted, an organic café nearby – here) and interesting people to look at (a man was wearing a cowboy hat, skinny jeans and some ballerina shoes whilst standing in line for a veggie burger).

On Boundary Street you can also find the great second-hand book shop Bent Books. Definitely a must-see for book lovers!

5th go out partying in Fortitude Valley. Make sure to dress nicely (no trainers or jumpers), otherwise some doormen might not let you enter a club or bar. Also check out the Royal Exchange Hotel on a Wednesday night. For Brisbane students it's the place to be. It's located directly at the Toowong train station near the University of Queensland.

6th visit GOMA, an international, open and free to anyone art museum offering a wide variety of artwork. There's a shop right next to the gallery, where you can buy books about art, smaller pieces of art (e.g. posters of Aboriginal art that I couldn't leave behind) and music.

Next to GOMA you can find the Sciencentre (especially suitable for kids wanting to learn more about science related phenomena). Moreover there's the Queensland Museum dedicated to Queensland's history and environmentally related effects happening in Queensland.

7th if you're interested in international food, pay a visit to the Eat Street Markets, which takes place on Macarthur Avenue in the eastern part of Brisbane. As soon as you enter the market ground (unfortunately there's an entry fee) you'll be taken from Thailand to France from Mongolia to Argentina and from the States to the Netherlands within seconds. They often invite musicians to perform at the centre of the market to make it even more internationally. As we were there, we listened to a band made up of artists from Columbia, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, El Salvador and more! Make sure to try one of the fancy dessert fusions. Have you ever heard of the Cronut?
It's incredible.

8th visit the Southbank Parklands near the centre of Brisbane where you can listen to street music, wander around the artificial beach or the tropical garden, explore the Asian temple inmidst the garden and eat at various restaurants.

Firstly I'd like to point out my favourite burger and hot chips restaurant Grill'd (167 Grey St.), try the sweet potato chips with the Summer Sunset burger. 

And secondly check out the chocolate bar Max Brenner's offering all kinds of chocolate; melted with strawberries to dip in, as a pizza or hot chocolate - you name it.

9th while you're at Southbank walk a bit further east to explore the Epicurious Gardens, it's a public vegetable and fruit garden that is organised by volunteers to offer public access to organic food production. You're welcome to have a little taste of the herbs you can find in the pots and on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays volunteers offer even more to try in their harvest cart.
When I went there, I plucked off a chili to use later on for pasta sauce. 

At times lectures will be held inmidst the plants to teach the audience methods of growing your own little veggies and to talk about sustainable lifestyle.
You can also become a volunteer if you're interested.

10th make your way up north to the Sunshine Coast for a day or two. It's much less crowded than the Gold Coast and offers magnificent national parks, a beautiful coast line, peaceful villages and amazing cafes. Don't miss out on Noosa (especially Tea Tree Bay, located in the national park), Caloundra (Kings Beach) and Montville (in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast).

That's it for now. I hope I could give you a small insight on what to do in the great city of Brisbane. It's a very liveable city and is one of my favourite cities around the globe.
I'd choose the city every time over Paris or Berlin.

Make sure to not give up your travel bug and keep exploring!

Steph

The Swedish dinner

Hey there!

Third stop: Sweden

For this month's international dinner we decided to take a look at the Swedish cuisine.

Swedish food is simple but very healthy. A lot of their meals include fish, deer and also native berries, mushrooms and herbs that can be found in the wide woods of Sweden.

Speaking of woods, there is a fact, I really like about Sweden (which doesn't have to do much with Swedish cuisine).

It's called the Right of Public Access (Swedish: allemansrätten) and it means if you go hiking you're basically allowed to set up your tent anywhere you like for a night.

National parks and areas like sanctuaries for plants and animals or culture reserves may be more restrictive, but in general you can stay wherever there is no farmland.

All you have to keep in mind is that you don't disturb local residents and that you don't leave any rubbish behind. If you do go hiking you will find noticeboards everywhere, that explain the specific regulations.

However that was just a little detour on our Culinary World Tour, now back to Swedish food. 

For our dinner we decided on the following dishes:

The courses

Starter – Potato and celeriac soup with smoked salmon and fresh herbs

Main – Pyttipanna, a mix of chopped meat, onions, potatoes and carrots

Dessert – Kanelbulle, cinnamon buns with sugar crystals on top

Firstly we made the dough for the cinnamon buns, since it had to rise for an hour.

After it had risen, we put the dough on the table and kneaded it until we were able to roll it out.
Then we made the filling for the buns and spread it on the rolled out dough.

To make the buns you have to roll the dough back in and cut off small pieces which will eventually become the delicious kanelbulle.

These rolls again had to sit and rise for a while. So we started chopping celeriac, potatoes, carrots, onions, the meat and the salmon, which we needed for the soup and the pyttipanna.

For the pyttipanna you can use any veggies you like, in Sweden it is often made as a leftover dish, so it's perfect for randomly throwing in anything you like.
The pyttipanna in Sweden also often includes meat from elks, but of course we couldn't find that sort of meat anywhere in Münster, so we simply used usual beef.

It's typical to have fried eggs with this dish, but as we were frying the eggs, they fell apart, so we improvised and made scrambled eggs instead.

For the soup we boiled potatoes, carrots and celeriac in a pot with water and vegetable stock and mashed it all together. We sprinkled some herbs on top and served it with smoked salmon and fresh pepper on the side.

And finally we had dessert:

If you like to cook one of these dishes, just search up kanelbulle, pyttipanna and swedish potato and celeriac soup and you'll find many different recipes to try.

German Christmas Markets..

Hey there!

Since it's almost Christmas, I thought I'd share a few photos from a recent visit to Cologne where I checked out the Christmas Market.

For anyone who has never been to a proper German Christmas market, I'll try to describe one.

A typical Christmas market is made up of various booths that either sell little Christmas presents or festive decoration, offer great typical German/Swiss/Austrian food or they are one of the most frequently visited, a "Glühwein" booth.

But what is "Glühwein"?
Basically Glühwein is a form of red wine that is heated up "glühen" (engl. to glow, to burn).
It is drunk by thousands and thousands of people each year. I wonder what Christmas markets would be like, if there wasn't any Glühwein around.
I guess someone would come up with a different alcoholic beverage...

Quite oddly the cups tend to shrink a tiny bit and somehow at the same time the price tends to increase every year. (Who would have thought?!)
Only this year I had my first ever Glühwein, but I must say that I just enjoy the "Kinderpunsch" a lot more. Kinderpunsch is non-alcoholic and tastes a bit like a mixture between warm apple juice and grape juice improved with several Christmas spices. Highly recommended!

However you can also try many of the various food options that are offered at each market. For example I can't look around the Christmas market of Cologne without having a "Germknödel".
The online dictionary PONS says a Germknödel is a "yeast dumpling filled with plum jam and poppy seeds sprinkled on top" - and I promise you it is delicious.
It does not look very attractive, but oh the taste.. everyone should try this at least once in their life.

Whilst being on a christmas market, you should also try edible chestnuts. These are probably more familiar to others, as they are often used for turkey stuffing.
Chestnuts have to be roasted for at least half an hour until their skin starts to crack. You then have to take off the shell and enjoy. They can also be easily made at home. Just use your oven instead and let them heat up for 30 minutes at 200° Celsius.

Last but not least Christmas markets offer various and numerous kinds of decoration or souvenirs. When I was little my Mama bought wooden breakfast boards at a Christmas market for my sister and me with animals and our names engraved on it. Another souvenir I really like are candles that smell like honey.

Many things you can find there are mostly handmade and authentic.

Whenever I visit one of these markets I'm instantly put in a Christmassy mood.

Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope you can spend this time of the year with all your loved ones in a place where you feel at home.

Greetings from Steph

The French dinner..

Hey there!

A new month has been running for a while now, so the time had come that we would organize a new global dinner within our modest student lifestyle. Each month we are treating ourselves to an amazing (at least we believe it is) dinner including a starter, main course and a dessert in the end.
This month we devoted ourselves to our beautiful neighbouring country France for a day (the wish was not particularly related to the recent occurences in France's capital).

Second stop: La France

The French cuisine is multi-faceted; we stumbled across recipes for Bouillabaisse (fish soup), escargots (snails, slightly hard to find at a traditional German food market..), the all-beloved but simple Croque Monsieur/Madame (a delicious sandwich, found frequently in the authentic bistros everywhere around France) and so many more interesting ideas.

This is what we finally decided on cooking for our French dinner:

The courses

Starter - Carrot, apple and spring onion salad with goat cheese
Main - Chicken in white wine sauce
Dessert - French Clafoutis

What could we do with all this?

After I had taken these photographs, a huge marathon of chopping veggies began.
In addition to this we had to separate our freshly bought organic chicken (from a farmer's market, of course), which turned out to be easier than it had seemed at the start. I recommend watching Jamie Oliver's video on how to cut a chicken properly.
We kicked off the preparation of our menu by roasting the chicken in a pan as well as setting up our wine with the shallots and the garlic to make the base for our white wine sauce.

Whilst the sauce was cooking my partner in crime grated a few carrots and apples and a small piece of goat cheese for our French salad (thank you to my dear friend Ka for giving us advice on what to make for our first course). Finally we added spring onions, lemon juice and some olive oil - and that was it!

Of course when preparing a French dinner, baguette should never be excluded...

As the sauce had reached its final stage, we added the chicken and let it simmer for half an hour so the chicken would become tender - time is key when it comes to many kinds of meat!

For our dessert we made a Clafoutis, which I had mentioned on my blog once already. If you like you can check out the recipe here.
However we changed it up a bit (actually made it more traditional than in my older post) and used cherries instead of raspberries.

In the end we were very proud on what we had cooked with the precious ingredients and we loved every bite of our French dinner!

Maybe we should stop here again while we are keeping up the tour..

The Italian dinner..

Hey there!

Just in time for my first semester of university my boyfriend Eike and I have thought of a project to celebrate our food affinity with. Because we'll now be spending a lot of time in libraries, actual travelling has become a little more complicated. That's why we came up with the idea of a culinary journey around the world as we were travelling around Australia.
Each month we will pick a nation and one of its typical meals (including starter, main and dessert). Together we'll try our best to prepare the meals as traditionally as possible and I will post updates on my blog about each nation/meal.

First stop: Bella Italia

This is what we chose for our Italian dinner:

The courses

Starter - Insalata Caprese
Main - Homemade Pizza
Dessert - Panna cotta with stewed berries

Unfortunately we forgot to buy basil, which would have taken the meal to another level..

For our pizza dough we used a recipe of Jamie Oliver (flour, water, baking powder), which worked out very nicely. According to Mr. Oliver the pizza should be slightly roasted in a pan for a few minutes so it becomes crispier, however we just put it in the oven straightaway, since we don't have an oven-proof pan.. Oh well, it still tasted amazing!

We prepared the panna cotta the night before, so it had enough time in the fridge to solidify. It came out of the moulds nicely, i hadn't thought, it would be that easy. Why would someone buy the finished product with a heap of conservatives, if it is this easy to make it yourself?!
We made some berry sauce to go with it and added a bit of honey for sweetening everything up!

So far so good, the tour has already proven to be a great decision.