Mardi Gras Time!

It's been the Gay and Lesbian festival for the last few weeks in Sydney. It finishes with one big parade though the town and a big party. I was walking around the route that the festival was going to take on Saturday say when I came across a big group of men dressed as cave men. Just had to get a picture shot of it, I'm sure Mark my hair dresser would be proud of me.

They were waiting at the lights when another group of men in leather bondage gear lined up across the street. Then they started to shout friendly abuse at each other. Very funny!

I met up with Allen and Deirdre later on in the day to find a good spot to watch the Mardi Gras parade.

As you can see Allen really didn't want to get involved and just turned up as per normal for an afternoon out. With his brown shirt and shorts with boots he really did look like he was the construction worker out of the YMCA song without a yellow hard hat.

We started to wait along the parade route at about five even though the parade didn't start till seven thirty. To top it off once the parade did start there wasn't anyone behind us so we really could have just walked up to the spot where we waited for a couple of hours. Doh!

There were a group of four women in front of Allen all with pink cowboy hats on. As you can see they were all quite good looking, unfortunately they were also two pairs of lesbians.

There were also four lesbians in front of me. These were the more stereo typical butch lesbians and two of them were very into each other. So much so that they insisted on kissing each other every few minutes just to show the world how much they loved each other.

Allen and I agreed that we wouldn't have minded so much if the pink cowboy hat ladies had been doing the same! :-)

The parade started with the traditional Dykes on Bikes as it does every year. They were exactly as they said on the tin. Not quite the dykes on peddle bikes as Deirdre suspected, but dykes on really big Harleys and other types of bikes.

The rest of the parade went on the next few hours as expected really. To be honest I didn't think that it was as impressive as it had been made out to be. It's apparently the biggest gay parade in the world, bigger than one in San Francisco.

There were a few good floats but most of them were quite tacky and it didn't look like that much effort had been put into them. Still I can tick the "been to the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras" parade box on my 'to do list' now.

We went for a pint on the way back from the parade. I saw an Irish pub that advertised that it sold pints of Guinness so we just had to stop there for a pint.

They really did sell pints of Guinness, I really could go up to the bar and ask for a pint. Unfortunately I went to the bar and asked for a Scooner of Guinness and the barwoman asked if I wanted a pint instead! Also it was Guinness extra cold and wasn't as good as a normal pint. Still beggars can't be choosers, no matter how much I whinge about it.