Mardi Gras in Sydney!

As I sit in my room right now, I look out of my window and see the ocean. I haven't been too pleased about the long walk up the hill to our campus throughout the last few weeks, but right now it is a comforting thought that I live up on the hill. An earthquake with the magnitude of 8.8 in Chile, so there is a tsunami warning here. So far, nothing but a couple hours of rain!

A group of us spent this weekend in Sydney. We took the ferry into the city after dinner and rode a bus to Jake's dorms. Mary, Mike and I know Jake from Albion and he is studying at the University of Sydney this semester. We hung out with him and his friends and they showed us the nightlife they have in Newtown. It was quite the night to say the least!!

Saturday was the main reason the the excursion into the city - Mardi Gras celebration!! The girls got ready in our sparkly outfits and we took a bus over to Darling Harbour. Mary and I met up with our friend Lisa Dorr who we played soccer with our freshman year at Albion. She is also our Delta Gamma sister :) It was good catching up!

There was a group of 10 of us from ICMS who signed up for a harbor cruise before the parade. We started at a bar where everyone met and got a free drink. To me, the best part was the HD TVs playing the Olympic speed skating. At school, there are very few TVs around, and I really miss watching the Olympic competitions. There were a couple of really thrilling races we watched before we boarded our Harbour cruise. Even though this Mardi Gras boat was organized by a party company called "Oz Party" the whole thing seemed very unorganized. We had to wait awhile to get on the boat, and while on the boat not everyone could be on the different levels. This became a problem when some of our friends were on the top level, and the rest of us wanted to join so we got in line to go up the stairs. They began to make people come downstairs so everyone could go upstairs, and this actually became a giant push fest. Being the claustrophobic person I am, this was probably one of the worst feelings ever!! Not soon enough we were able to go up on the third floor and see the view of the harbour. Overall, there were a lot of great views from the boat, and a lot of interesting people on it. After our boat tour, we had to wait to take buses to the bar where we could watch the Mardi Gras parade from. Once again, the buses were incredibly unorganized, and I ended up waiting a good 45 minutes with Mike and Alex before we got on the third and final bus. However, the bus ride was quite fun - they played music really loud as everyone sang the songs loudly, and people on the streets seemed to think we were quite the sight! The bus couldn't take us right to the bar because streets were blocked off, so we had to walk a couple of crowded blocks to the bar.

The walk to the bar reminded me of how much I hate really crowded events. We were able to find the bar "the Gaff" without too many problems. We couldn't find anyone else from our group, so we ended up getting drinks that came with a "free meal coupon" so we could eat dinner. It was a good deal - $7 dollars for cider, fish, and chips!! After we finished eating we went out to the street to see some of the parade. The streets were packed!! Many people had come hours beforehand to claim their spots at the front. There were a few vendors along the streets selling cheap plastic stools for $8 - 10 dollars for people to stand on in the back of the crowds. I'm certainly glad I didn't buy one of those, at one point we saw a group of three people fall to the ground because their stools broke! (My last picture is of the group prior to their stools breaking.) Mike told me he heard about 1 million people come out to this parade. Even though I was in the back I could see the tops of different floats, all very different from any parade I had ever seen before!

Soon we met up with the rest of our group and went back into the Gaff. They had the parade playing on their TVs, and I could see first hand that this parade was one of a kind. The most interesting and disturbing part was "Hardcore Heaven" which I am not going to describe here. Some of our friends decided to go home, but Mike, Mary, Heather and I went back to Jake's to hang out with his friends and go out. We met up with Jeremy Greene, another student from Albion who is studying in Sydney. It's amazing that five Albion friends could all be hanging out in Australia together!

This morning Mary, Heather, Mike and I came back to Manly on the ferry. I had a coffee and banana loaf for breakfast - Starbucks had never tasted so good! After a fun and adventure filled weekend, it was good to be back home at ICMS, safe on top of the hill! On to week four of classes!