Sydney Redux

There I was sleepy and having a nice beer with my friends in the hostel when Tyler and Jill ripped my from my comfort zone and tossed me headlong into the minuscule yet ready ample arms of the back seat of a mini cooper. (and yes it was kind of an uncomfortable place).

We headed to a friend of Jill's house and drank Peroni until the sun came up. Actually we kicked it pretty early that night as we were all tired. The next night day we headed to the horse races. I've never been to a horse race in the US let alone one in another country. The tradition it appeared was one of the British ilk when it came to dress, Big hats (which we'll go into later) and fancy duds for the men. That is were the tradition stoped being British and became purely Australia.

Dresses in every color adorned the green in front of the race track, having a competition of their own as to who could be the shortest on the thighs. The hats the women were wearing were more of a "hat gesture" than a hat. Tiny top hats were precariously pinned to clumps of women's hair. Little red berets hung from bottle blond locks and even the occasional miniature cowboy hat waltzed by akimbo.


The men were decked out their sunday best with sun-glasses fake tans and wads of cash. One man came as a circa 19070s pimp.

As we entered the front gate there were dogs which I later found out were sniffing for cocaine. It's a filthy habit for dogs but there you are. The doberman looked at me with those "gotta get my next fix" eyes and felt suddenly sorry for him.



<--Here is a picture of what happens when you take too much cocaine. Stay in school kids.

We weren't there 10 minutes before I surmised that really the only reason for about 90% of the people to be there was to get dressed up and DRINK HEAVILY.


Horse races are fast. Waiting for them to start and killing the in-between time, that's the trick. Enter our old friend "extremely overprice libation." As well as I can tell you just sit and drink and lose money and drink some more. Somewhere in there you get the vague idea there are some animals running around but no one has told you when or where.


After a long day of watching everyone around us get unstable we headed to a bar where I was obliged to pay $7 for 10oz of crappy Australia beer. Hey but the music was good. After a while I got bored and eventually fell asleep a bit in my chair. I was immediately thrown out of the bar. Tyler was thrown out minutes afterward for reading a book.

Right before I left I managed to take one picture. Funny but not every Australia I would meet would be the svelte surfer you might imagine.




The next day would start late.