I'm still suffering even now. The infection decided to turn into a cold on Friday....so I haven't really been sleeping very well as I haven't been able to breathe through my nose! Sorry, I sound like a right old whinger don't I! Anyway, Saturday afternoon, Jason and I headed into town early so we could get a good spot to watch the gay and lesbian Mardi Gras parade....I'd heard it was a must see. So we bought some drinks from the bottle shop, then met up with Sue at 4.30. We found a good spot to sit at the side of the street to wait for the carnival, it wasn't going to be starting until 8pm, but everyone gets there early. We saw some very funny sights, one guy was walking down the road with just his boots, and a thong…nice!! We had great fun whilst we were waiting, there were lots of organisers handing out whistles, balloons, shakers, lollypops...Sue and I did a good job of chatting to them and they kept giving us free stuff!! We were also playing beach volleyball with them. Rach, Stu and Liz and Mike had turned up by now too. A bit later on they had some more entertainment...a drag queen called Sandy Bottom, he/she made us all dance and sing along to the music, which passed a bit of time....so when it was time for the parade, we were all raring to go! First off were the 'dykes on bikes' there must have been hundreds of them on their motorbikes...it was really funny...most of them did look like blokes I have to say! There were some great floats, I've got some really great footage on my camera. There were guys dressed up as Kate Moss throwing white powder on the street and pretending to snort it all...they even had giant credit cards, very amusing. There were lots of sailors, cowboys, Snow White and the 7 dykes...in fact everything you could imagine...lots of people with skimpy outfits (some of them really shouldn't have!!) and one of the floats was based on Little Britain except their slogan was 'You're not the only gay in the village'. It was a pretty amazing carnival, I've never seen anything like it before. The streets were absolutely packed, apparently there was about 300,000 people there. After the parade had finished we fought our way down the road to the Burdekin which is mine and Sue’s old local. It took us ages to get in as it was so busy, but we eventually made it…we managed to lose everyone else in the process though. We had a couple of drinks in there, but it was so busy and hot, we thought we’d call it a night and went and had a slice of pizza.
Yesterday was a bit of a non event…Jason was sick as he’d drunk too much on Saturday night, and I wasn’t feeling too great either, so we just hung around the flat. Later on we went to the cinema to see Brokeback Mountain, which I really enjoyed.
I had a better nights’ sleep last night, although I was rudely awoken by a mosquito buzzing right in my ear…the bloody thing had bitten my arms and my legs! I’d only said to Jason that evening that we haven’t had any bugs for a while (this was also before I saw the huge cockroach on the floor!) Roll on the winter!!