Australia Day Ball

On Thursday night we had the opportunity to attend the Australia Day Ball at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Australia Day is basically the 4th of July for Australia, celebrating the founding of Australia as a country (although my Australian friends couldn't really give me any further information on the holiday besides that). The event was "Underbelly" themed (the Aussie Mobster show about the Melbourne/Sydney drug-lords from 1975 to 1985) and so people were encouraged to dress in costume or else just cocktail attire. Lots of people did dress as police officers and wear ridiculous 70's suits, however, I unfortunately do not own any 70's attire (damnit why did I let my mom throw away her high school wardrobe!), so just wore a black dress.

Oddly enough, we actually have several Australian friends in Dubai, so it wasn't completely random to attend this event (although we can rarely turn down all you can drink and eat events). Our friend Clare arranged a table for 12 and three of our Australian friends (and their significant others) attended, and we also met some other lovely Australians who were friends of friends.

The night began with a champagne cocktail hour with passed hor d'oeuvres and then a sit down dinner with crab cakes to start (probably my all time favorite starter!) and then beef cheek (which tasted like short-ribs) with mashed potatoes, carrots, and asparagus and Australian pavlova for dessert (meringue with fruit - not as good as Clare made for our Thanksgiving feast though). For such a large event (probably 150-200 people attended) the food was actually quite good, and the wine and beer were freely flowing. Throughout the dinner they had little Underbelly skits going on involving pretending to arrest various people and pretend court sessions. Kind of silly at such a high end event, but fun nonetheless.

After dinner an Australian band began and the dance floor filled up. The majority of the songs though were Australian and nothing that Jared and I had ever heard before, so we weren't too inclined to dance... until "I come from a land down under" came on and I was able to drag Jared to the dancefloor for one song.

Jared and Mahmoud, [reluctantly] getting into the gangster theme.

Me & Dijana.

The Girls.

We decided that we had had quite enough to drink by about 12:30 so left on the early side. We are off to a much better start to having more 'tame' weekends already. God Bless Australia!