My week...

What has Tara been up to in the last week – you might ask yourself, starting into your 2nd double latte of the morning – we’ll I’ll tell you! (Mostly because I have completed all my duties for the day, and it’s 11:15am. How do people create full time jobs out of this stuff??)

Last Saturday, Peggy and I joined in on City Chase Sydney. For those of you who missed the race last year in Vancouver – it’s basically an Amazing Race contest, only with 150 teams instead of 16 (or whatever the show has) I had soooo much fun at City Chase last year (including being shot in the butt with a paint ball gun - thank you Tim – and stripping off for a pool challenge at UBC…) Long and short – the Vancouver race was a total blast (next race is May in Van – if you are interested). This was the first City Chase Sydney. Now, not only is my sense of direction not good at the best of times – I am still a tourist in this town. So I signed up 3 Aussies to help me along, Peggy (my team mate) and a guy I worked with at Westpac, Rohan and his buddy Chris.

Now – we were supposed to act as a foursome – an idea which died pretty much as soon as we left the starting point. Running over the pedestrian bridge from the Casino into downtown, Peggy stopped – we were banning all running from this competition, except for crossing streets, catching lights or towards food. Rohan and Chris just left us in the dust.

We worked well as a team though – climbed one of the supports of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, we slid down slides, did back flips, jumped in pools and unlocked locks blindfolded. I really thought were were doing well… until leaving the entertainment quarter, 6/10 chase points under our belt, when we met another team… at 9/10 chase points. Then I got a phone call from Rohan – they had already finished and were sucking back Becks. Sigh.

Peggy says I was perfectly happy until I knew we were behind…

It took us another hour and a bit to finish our race, coming in at an embarrassing 123/150 teams. At least I got to sing Green Day’s American Idiot at the Karioke place – it made us feel a whole lot better to just yell for 4 minutes.

After a few beers, it was time for a shower, a feed and getting dolled up for Peter’s Supermodel party.

Peter had gone all out – he had gone crazy at the liquor store, filling up a kitchen counter with every imaginable libation. Almira and I had taken over the ‘fun’ stuff, creating fashion police tickets to issue to transgressors, press releases, party passes, custom named cocktails (like Cocaine and Dolce does Gabbana). We covered the walls with “press photos” of our supermodels, projecting Ben Stiller’s Zoolander over the DJ booth. It’s been a long time since we had a good theme party. And the best part? After all that socialising , Pete has enough alcohol left over to do it all again!

(Check out Pete - tough entertaining the ladies all night - that's Sue and Peggy enjoying themselves)

BinGay? Now I can never go back

For you fans of Aussie culture, one of the best Aussie films of all time, is the Legendary “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” The original and far more entertaining film than “Too Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.”

Our intrepid Drag Queens, and their pink show bus, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert start the film leaving their home, the Imperial Hotel in Sydney. The real Imperial Hotel (in Newtown) has a Priscilla drag show every Friday – we haven’t made it to a single one – but one of our buddies sweet-talked us into one of Mitzi's famous ‘BinGay” evening at the Imperial.

BinGay is Bingo like everyone should play Bingo – it’s the most fun I have ever had filling in a number sheet. The basics are the same, the host, Mitzi, a fabulous 6’4” drag queen has to do everything over the top.

So picture the scene – it happens to be Mitzi’s birthday (#41), so the bar is strewn with balloons, streamers, everyone has a birthday party hat, noise makers and confetti. Mitzi, with her fabulous glitter-blue lipstick is leading the newbies through the different kinds of bingo games we are going to do… on cards she calls names like the ‘watercress’ one (meaning green).

Now, as Mitzi calls out the numbers, every number has action/comment:
“16” Mitzi shouts – “legal for boys and girls!”
“8 – all alone, fat chick”
“11 – pair of legs”
“I love ‘em best at 21”
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64”
54 means Mitzi’s BinGay assistant hands her a cooler (there’s one in each colour of the rainbow lined up) and her companion Naomi sings songs like “I love the Nightlife,” “Studio 54” etc. until Mitzi skulls it.

Other sounds and phases for numbers – surprise, surprise, 69 was only in audio – are significantly more raunchy, and probably not best to type out in public space (check out the Bingay web site. ) If you called out “BinGay” prematurely, Mitzi had a rather unflattering hat made of sex toys you had to wear until the next person screwed up. The whole evening was shrieks of laughter from the audience, especially after a few 54’s were called out and Mitzi started slurring her words and being a little more vocal in the entertainment. Everyone who won picked out unusual prizes… like the only g-sting bikini-wearing garden gnome I have ever seen in my life (who makes these things? And what’s the consumer demand really?). There is a softer side – all the proceeds go to an Australia AIDS Society – Mitzi has raised over $300,000 through BinGay to support their programs – which is their largest single donor.
Highly recommended for a bored Tuesday night!

Canada Bear

Al and I found the Canada Bear at Circular Quay on St. Pat's day

St. Patricks – a beauty weekend

We attempted to celebrate St. Patricks by doing our own exclusive pub crawl… unfortunately for us, everyone else had already bribed the bouncers, and we weren’t getting in anywhere. OK. We were getting in some places, but we were staggered by the round-the-corner lines for every pub. Half of Ireland is living in Sydney, and they were all determined to drink for the rest who weren’t with them – it was quite the sight!

To work off the over-consumption and Irish-ness of the night before, the next morning I attempted to beat out the alcohol in a thorough drubbing of surfing lessons. I always forget that after a couple hours of fighting surf, your mouth tastes like you have been chewing on a salt lick…eeeuw. My flatmate met me for a gorgeous walk along the coast from Bondi to Maroubra Beach – it’s about a 2 and a half hour walk, through some of the most spectacular sandstone cliff faces. We’ve done the walk from Bondi to Coogee with just about everyone that’s visited us, but the extra 40 minute walk to Maroubra is the best part. …and we ruined it with a great big chocolate milkshake…mmmm

One of the things I love about this country, is the slightly more relaxed view on public drinking. You can bring your own bottle of wine to the open air cinema, you can have champers in the park with your picnic, you can have a beer while you play your footy. No need to get slaughtered, just a nice tipple in the afternoon. The structured beer gardens of Canada are just so… puritan in comparison. I will admit there’s more public drunkenness, but on the whole people are well behaved and just looking to enjoy themselves. It was such a treat on Sunday to be walking downtown and stumble on the St. Pat’s festival going off in a park in the centre of Sydney. There were families and friends, Irish and everyone, having a Guiness in the park while they tapped their feet to a celtic jig. There were fences to keep people from falling into traffic, but you were able to roam free over the whole festival – take your beer to the Himalayan food tent (of course! At the Irish festival…) and get your dumplings, swig your lager at the stage and trade cheers amongst the families picnicking on the grass. Now, in some places it looked like a college keg party at 2pm, but as long as you swilled down the last of your stout before you left the confines of the festival grounds, no worries – and no beer corral necessary. Why in a country where we pride ourselves on being dull peacekeepers can we not trust each other to drink a civilized beer at the dragon boating festival? Sigh…

All my mom thinks I do in Oz is drink and have fun. Not true! but last weekend it was....

Friday night drinks are the closest thing to a secular religion in Sydney, and it's a ritual that's important for my professional development. Friday drinks before Mardi Gras weekend was just the start of a great time.

Mardi Gras is the big, huge and I mean massive Gay Pride parade in Sydney. The entire length of Oxford Street is lined with people for this parade, and an amazing number of people prepare for this parade to last all weekend long. Almira and her sister Jobina have their parents in town, so Mardi Gras was quite the experience for the Bardai family. They located a view spot right in front of the "Glam Stands" the VIP viewing area with free flowing food, champagne, and seats in all the colours of the rainbow. I joined one of our friend's here, Matt, who is a DJ, who was doing a gig at the top of Oxford St. in Taylor Square in the T2 hotel - spitting distance from the jumbo-tron screen, and ground zero for par-tay.

Love the perks - I got to be 'with the DJ' and had free drinks, food, whistles, flags, Tupperware maracas, confetti, streamers and a lot of drunken entertainment. Only at a Gay party is the free cocktail on offer a lychee and lime mohito. I can get used to this. This parade is positively astounding. Starting at 7:30pm, it takes almost 3 hours to pass you, and for the hooting and hollering you do at the start, by the time the last float goes by you can barely croak.
And the parade is impressive - from campy to fabulous, cheesy, political, thrown together, over-the-top entertainment. (can I tell you home many cowboys and Brokeback Mountain take offs there were?) Part of the huge draw of Mardi Gras (other than the parade, and the hundreds of kids, teenagers and everyone else dressed outlandishly and having a fantastic time) is the legendary after parties. After the parade passes, you can join the parade route and follow the crowd to the after party - and that's only the beginning.

Now that the parade itself has passed, Oxford Street looks like it's been hit with a litter tornado. Every hotel, bar, restaurant, lounge, clothing store is open, and having an impromptu party (including people just sitting in circles on milk crates in the middle of the parade route to party until the cops kick them out.) The Official Mardi Gras after party ($70 a ticket, 18,000 people) rages all night, until Toy Box, the after-after party that was at the Luna Park amusement park, starting sometime on Sunday morning, and then there is the after, after-after party DTM starts sometime on Sunday afternoon. You need chemical support to survive that kind of party-hard. I know a few Sydney-siders who spent their Sunday just watching the carnage in Paddington and Darlinghurst.

Instead of watching the party aftermath on Sunday, with Almira's parents in town, we took the opportunity to do a day trip to the Hunter Valley - a beautiful wine region just over an hour and a half from Sydney. Talk about a great day - we bought fresh figs on the side of the road, tasted some lovely Aussie wines and ports, and rounded out the afternoon with olive and cheese tastings. I have never seen Mr. Bardai drive so fast as when Almira was dying to get to one last winery before they closed of the evening, peddle to the metal, she wanted to get to the church on time! (It was closed. Funnily enough, the winery we were aiming for, happened to have it's tasting room in an old church.)