I think the Superbowl is the best possible comparison to Melbourne Cup Day (and for those of you who don’t know, pronounce it Melbin please).  Just like during the Superbowl, you spend the day eating and drinking massive quantities, and bet away a tiny to extremely large portion of your salary on the possible outcome.  Only during Melbourne Cup Day, you eat canapes instead of chips, you drink champagne instead of beer, the betting is legal, encouraged, and highly profitable (for the winners that is) and instead of team jerseys and sweat pants, you wear your race day finest.

The fashion is perhaps the most fun part of the day’s festivities.  Whether you are attending the race or not, you are expected to dress for the track.  Men wear fine suits with Easter egg colored ties and women wear tiny, highlighter colored dresses, with elaborate hats called fascinators.  I don’t know why they are called fascinators, but they certainly are fascinating.  Somewhere between a hat and a hair clip, they are decorated with feathers, flowers and all sorts of bright flora and fauna, and worn at a jaunty angle.  This tradition has to have come from Australia’s British routes.  The Empire lives on!

But at it’s core, Melbourne Cup day is just another good excuse to party.  It’s a formal holiday in Melbourne, and an unofficial afternoon off for the rest of the country.  Perhaps they realized long ago, that even though the race itself is only a blurry two minutes of jumbled up racehorses nosing their way to the finish, that the massive lunch and several glasses of champagne consumed before the race, would leave every Australian in a useless state for the rest of the day.

And just like the Superbowl, Melbourne Cup Day ends with stumbling and a little vomiting.  Yes, everyone may look classy but being well dressed doesn’t increase your tolerance.  Melbourne Cup attenders beware, if you vomit while still on the field, you will be on the news.  Their parents must be so proud.

This particular Melbourne Cup day came with a bit of an inconvenience for those of us living on the North Shore of Sydney.  Just when everyone was starting to stumble home post race, the trains broke down and legions of brightly dresses party goers were forced to walk home in the record heat of thirty seven degrees.  If you are only familiar with the Fahrenheit scale, just know that that’s HOT!  I’m very glad that as a brazen foreigner, I decided to violate race day fashion rules and wore flats.