Another spectacular weekend full of action and adventure, it all started on Saturday morning, well actually it started on Friday night with one of the biggest rain storms south east Queensland has ever seen. Paige’s friend Dakota had come around hoping for a surf session in the morning and looking forward to a bake off with Paige on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately the massive storm put paid to our Surf session ideas by the time Saturday morning rolled around the waves were a cracking 6 – 8’ tall and extremely messy, so no dice.

We were all up reasonably early and made our way into the city, I dropped Tiff and the kids off at the meeting point for their Buddha’s Birthday activities and then headed over into the city to find a park. Now that should have been a fairly straight forward task, just take the vehicle, find a park and then come back and meet up with Tiff, no problem. Well me being me as I was driving down Margaret street I saw a huge line of people and thought wow, I wonder what is going on over there, I had better go and investigate the next thing I knew this happened.

May the 4th be with you

So you can imagine Tiffs surprise when I turn up a few minutes later with the above photograph on my phone and she was like I can’t leave you alone anywhere. Having ditched the kids with their Chinese teachers for the Buddha’s Birthday activities we decided to see if we could find a couple of the English Schools that my Columbian buddy Diego was thinking of attending and of course decided to take a few shots and make a story out of our search along the way.

These guys let me know where to find some good grass

Let the search continue

Keep searching the good search

After we were all searched out we made our way back over to the activities in South Bank to see how the Kids were doing and they were having a great time attending Chinese tea ceremonies, taking part in Kung Fu demonstrations, doing calligraphy and generally having fun. We collected the kids once they were finished and headed over to George’s Sushi place for some Sushi.

Calligraphy

Kung Fu

Tiff dropped Byron and myself back home so he could get ready to spend the night at a mates place. I walked with him to his mates place and was supposed to drop him off and get back home to do a few things, well that was what I was supposed to do, but of course Byron’s mates Dad (Dean) had a couple of beers that needed drinking and seeing as I always try to help out where ever I can, I was still there later in the evening when Tiff called to find out where I was. Paige and Dakota had started cooking and Tiff needed someone for moral support, in the end she came up to Byron’s mates place and we all helped Dean drink a few more of his beers.

When we arrived back home the girls had done a spectacular job, they had cooked up a delicious chicken noodle soup for entre and beef stroganoff with steamed vegetables for mains, the only thing that didn’t turn out was the muffins for desert because they had used plain flour instead of self raising, it didn’t really matter as we were all full from the other two amazing courses anyway.

Sunday morning rolled around and proved to be equally exciting, the waves were still pounding away at the coast so once again we eared on the side of caution and decided that we would try again next weekend.

We collected Byron bleary eyed from watching too much television for most of the night from his mates place and made our way back into Southbank so that Paige could participate in the Buddha’s birthday procession. The procession turned out to be awesome with a QLD police marching band, Shaolin Dragons and various other community representatives.  The procession started in the cultural square and made its way through Southbank to the Piazza where everyone presented gifts to the Buddha’s, this was followed by a stack of chanting, singing and speeches before they cracked out the dude with a cyr wheel and some Kung fu dragons.

Byron with his Shaolin Kung Fu Dragon

Paige’s costume for the procession

After the festivities we grabbed a couple of burgers from one of the cafes in the city and then headed up to Gav’s place to help him clean up after the flooding that went through his warehouse on Friday night. Now Gav for those who don’t know runs a theming business, so when we arrived the kids thought they had wandered into a toy store come wonderland with giant horses, thrones, mannequins, giant cages, swords and any number of exciting toys and paraphernalia. We all got stuck in and did our bit to help out with the kids taking a break every now and again to dress up and attack each other with fake pirate swords or pretend to be stuck in the giant cages, good times and another fun weekend.

Guilty of having way too much fun, take that man away.