Front room - not a very desirable suite, but hey, it'll do for me!

The most important thing you are thinking of course, is what about the night life?! Well, I think this is going to be another culture shock, as when we asked about drinking establishments we were shown…2. The Black Nugget (also a motel) is the place to be, bar meals, live bands, the works – get this, it even has a Crystal Maze style dome (but it’s a rectangle shape) when you grab as many money vouchers as you can!! I can’t wait to get in that. The peculiar thing (or indeed great thing if you are that way inclined) is that lots of bars in Australia come complete with a bookies. So you find people playing ‘Pokies’ (like a lottery-style game drawn every 15 mins) sat next to you in the bar, and if you are watching the rugby, you can nip and put a bet on the score while you drink! This is quite a cunning move by the Australian betting companies as I’m sure they must rake in lots of money from drunken people. I just can’t see it happening in England somehow. The other place to drink in Mornabah is the workers’ club – yep, same as the working men’s clubs in the UK, we haven’t ventured in there yet, it has one of those ominous looks to it, as though it degenerates into the bar scene from Airplane on an evening. If you are into your sports, which every single person in Australia seems to be, then you can also get a drink at the golf club and the rugby club. We actually watched a rugby match the other night, my first ever rugby match – I think it was union! It was the last game of the season between Moranbah and some ‘neighbouring’ town about 2 hours drive away. The visitors, bless, hadn’t got a full team, so some of the Mornabah lads had to play for them!! I’m yet to learn the rules of rugby (despite years of travelling with Mark and Faron!!) so I concentrated on the drinking side of things. Now, even when you manage to find a bar in Moranbah – and this applies to every bar we’ve been to in Australia, you think it will then be a relatively stress-free task to order a drink… oh no, order a lager and you get asked a fairly standard question of what type of lager (XXXX Gold being ever so popular) but then whether you want a pot/tinny/pint/stubby/pitcher or something else we still can’t decipher so haven’t asked for it yet. Not only are there all these options of how you want your lager, but they are recited at you in about 2 seconds. Andy initially was like a rabbit in headlights and stuttered out the only syllable he could make out, but through a bit of trial and error we have managed to make the following discoveries: A pot is a half pint (or roughly equivalent), a pint is obvious, a pitcher is a jug, a tinny is a can and a stubby is a bottle – which comes complete with a stubby-holder, a polystyrene bottle holder to stop your hands getting cold! The drinks are served at the coldest temperatures imaginable so a stubby-holder is recommended, quite why there aren’t such things as pot/pint holders as well I haven’t grasped yet as they are equally as cold. Not being a beer drinker myself I was pleasantly surprised to find that Strongbow is served everywhere – but even that though comes with the question of sweet, dry or draught! The best thing of all in Moranbah, and throughout Australia, though are the drive-through off-licenses, they are as frequent as fast-food drive-throughs!! Most even have 2 lanes, one for drive-through and one for browsing. Quite why you need to have your beer at such a fast speed is beyond me at the moment, but the whole culture in Australia seems similar to America from what I’ve seen so far in that people just don’t walk anywhere, they take the car.