Mardi Gras

Sydney has one of the largest LGBTQI celebrations in the world! Centered around the Mardi Gras Parade. This parade was huge, colorful and so much fun to experience. 

We showed up hours before the parade was to start, to get a good spot and enjoy the festivities. The parade runs down oxford street, a street with the reputation as being the primary nightclub strip and through an area known as Sydney’s main gay district.

Each business was showing their colors, the banks fully bedazzled the ATMs into beautiful works of art

The fun began as soon as we got there, Yael got her face painted by our new friends from the Netherlands

and I got a lipstick heart from one of the volunteers

Then we found this gem of a liquor store! What a fun play on words; and the best part is, this part of the street is so eccentric that it’s here all the time, not just for the parade.

Before the parade even began we saw showgirls (and guys)

Nuns, well guys dressed as nuns

Guys in leather on leashes

 And more assless chaps than I thought existed in the world

The parade kicks of with a special showing of Dykes on Bikes!

One of the first floats had some technical difficulties and required the muscles of those involved to get the car up the street

Lots of crazy things happened once the parade started

 Some political statements were made such as this jewel, Uncle Sam enslaved by money and ruling over other people.

And a number of floats focusing on Putin and Russia’s policies brought to light during the winter Olympics

I was surprised to see so many government run groups as a part of the parade. In the US you would never see such a thing. All branches of the military were there.

There were a lot of themed floats and groups including Star Trek!

and one of my personal favorites, Dr. Who

Google was there and lots of catholic and other religious groups

My favorite of all the floats were the ones by the farmers and environmental groups.

The permaculture group used a wonderful double entendre; diversity in people and diversity in plants both lead to abundance. If everyone picked up on the plant side of this float the world could be a better place. Sadly we live in a world of commercialized monocultures. That’ll have to change.

This was such a fun event and great to see so much acceptance in the world.