...Well At Least The Melbourne Cup!
The Australians surely know how to party. The last time we partied with them was for the Great Wall Ball back in May, this time is the Melbourne Cup. All I knew about it was that I needed a hat and that there were some drinks involved, or and some horse racing too.
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| The Girls and the Horse! |
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:
The Melbourne Cup is Australia's major annual thoroughbred horse race. Billed as The race that stops a nation, it is for three-year-olds and over, and covers a distance of 3,200 metres. It is generally regarded as the most prestigious "two-mile" handicap in the world. The event is held on the first Tuesday in November by the Victoria Racing Club, on the Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne.
The event is one of the most popular spectator events in Australia, with sometimes over 110,000 people, some dressed in traditional formal raceday wear and others in all manner of exotic and amusing costumes, attending the race.
“Fashions On The Field” is a major focus of the day, with substantial prizes awarded for the best-dressed male and female racegoers. The requirement for elegant hats, and more recently the alternative of a fascinator, almost single-handedly keeps Melbourne's milliners in business.
In 2000 it was estimated that 80 percent of the adult Australian population placed a bet on the race that year. In New Zealand the Melbourne Cup is the country's single biggest betting event, with carnival race-days held at several of the country's top tracks showing the cup live on big screens.
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| Where is Waldo? |
