Time for a report on the trip to the Brisbane Exhibition last Sunday.
If it was up to me, I would arrive at 9am and leave at 9.30pm, but my wife is not from these parts, and considers that to be just a ridiculously long day. (You have to be born and raised in Brisbane to have the inordinate fondness for the place that quite a few of us here share.) I think she actually threatened last year to just leave me to take the kids this time, but somewhere in the intervening 12 months she changed her mind, and ended up a relatively happy participant. She missed my daughter - now 6 - telling me in the afternoon, without prompting, that it was "the best day ever". I passed the message on to my wife with a small degree of smug satisfaction.
[Later in the day, I observed to my wife that it is pleasing to see a lot of Asian and other immigrants at the show. She claimed it was because Brisbane was short of entertainment anyway, and people just go to whatever is on. As you can see, the brainwashing has some way to go yet.]
Before I leave the topic of the marital dispute over the exact degree of enjoyment an adult can appropriately extract from the Ekka, I should also mention that I took my aged mother along this year too. (She resisted getting in the car at first, but after a bit of shoving she accepted her fate.)
We arrived at about 11am, and left after the fireworks at 8.45.
So this year's highlights:
* new lambs in the sheep birthing place were cute (but we didn't actually see one being born)
* I get happiness from the fact that my kids chose relatively cheap buys in the show bags, yet were very satisfied. The boy takes the show as an opportunity to weaponise himself for the following 12 months, and this year he was happy with one $10 machine gun that, I must admit, I would have liked as a boy too. The girl went for a cutesy pet bag with lots of stationary in it.
* the "jet truck" was new and kind of slow and pointless, except it did make a very big flame that is pretty spectacular.
* we all decided that the latest rides look downright dangerous, and potentially not just to the riders. The current new types seem to involve variations on a theme of long arms which spin people sitting at the end around in a vertical circle. Why anyone thinks this is fun is beyond me; I can barely stand the roller coaster type rides at Disneyland, where one feels Uncle Walt surely wouldn't scare you to death. (Space Mountain is probably the strongest ride I have ever been on.) Not being a fan of the falling sensation, this looks particularly horrendous to me:
It's also clear that if there is a catastrophic failure, then, depending on the exact point of the circle it happens, the passengers could end up some distance away and take out many passers-by. I certainly did not like to stand in the plane of the ride, just in case.
Anyhoo, a pleasant day was had by all, even though my mother elected to stay the night but by the end decided she really was too old to spend that much time there. I pointed out that she was giving up to easily: there is always the wheelchair option when she's 90. (She's only got 5 years to reach that milestone.)
Finally, I note that big re-development of the site is finally going to get underway, which means that residential units and some all year round commercial use will be allowed on parts of the land. (As I recall, it is all owned by the Royal National Association, and the Council and State government have been lusting after the re-development potential of the place for decades.) This report gives an idea of some of the changes. I am not sure how it affect the Ekka itself; it's hard to imagine some of the old buildings gone. But the upside is: maybe I can retire there, as one of the blessed 10,000 residents. Not quite like living in Disneyland, but still...
3 comments:
Thankyou for the description of your day at the Ekka.
I share your fear of the diabolical rides and while my children avoid the more suicidal ones, I still feel sick while they are on them.
We lasted 9am until the fireworks finished, although we lingered for a few songs from Bob Evans.
In the last few years I have discovered the secret to a good day at the Ekka - forgive me if I've mentioned this before - it's the the meat pavilion restaurant - run by Brett's Wharf this year - a beautifully cooked steak and a bottle of red wine. The rest of the day flies by!
Unfortunately my children have decided that this is a good idea too, so the most expensive part of the day is not rides nor samplebags but lunch.
There was a National Geographic article about state fairs by Garrison Keillor that revealed how alike they were to our agricultural shows. There is a link to it here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2009/08/state_fair.html
Yes, I still haven't got around to having a steak at that place. I'm not sure whether I would find the rest of the day more tiring, or better, after half a bottle of red at lunch, though. Evening seems a better idea to me, but by then the kids usually want to get to the ring to see what's going on.
By the way, they don't have ring announcers there like the old one, I reckon. (What was that guy's name who did it for decades?) No character in the current ones.
The ring announcer is awful now. If the old one is still alive they should drag him out of retirement.
At least The Man from Susan River didn't recite any of his bloody awful bush poetry this year.
The half bottle of red makes things much better - certainly reduces the amount of footache.
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