Fitzroy and Dracula's!

Tuesday morning started off with lovely chats with Maddy and Bestie, and it was good to get a quick catch up with them both. My bestie got an offer from Southampton Solent University :D So mega proud. She's going to one of the top animators ever, you know. They will never have seen a talent like it.


After that I mooched on facebook for a while, being careful of the time because you have to pay for internet by the hour at the Nunnery. It was the same at King Street, so I presume it will be the same at the Coffee Palace in St Kilda, where we will be heading Wednesday for two nights. I'll be sorry to leave the Nunnery and Fitzroy, as it's such an interesting part of the city, but I'm keen to be by the beach again.


I know I said that Fitzroy is amazing, but I never really explained why. Well, I'll give you that explanation now. It's a mixture of opposites - retro and modern, sophisticated and scruffy, posh and goth. The retro clothes shops are everywhere, with 20's to 60's clothing all hanging on the rails patiently. The retro look is common here, as it is back in England at the moment. When people run out of ideas they look back to what worked in the past, and that's where this fashion has come from. 


But then right next door to the retro shop, there'll be a shop all in black. There are quite a few gothic shops in Fitzroy, and Mal you would love it. Nic's taken me into almost every one we've passed, and even I have to admit that some of the stuff can be classy, even if it's not what I would wear personally. I never realised how expensive goth clothing is - there were corsets there for around $300 and more, which is just crazy. If you wanna be a goth-goth, you gotta have the money.


There are lots of little independant shops here, and that's refreshing too. Rather than seeing the high-street retailers again and again, and not having too much choice in where to shop, in Fitzroy there's so much choice you won't know what to do with yourself. Most of it is tremendously expensive, but still, the choice is there.


There is an awful lot of graffiti here. There are some rubbish scribbles and tags of bored teenagers looking to break some petty laws, enough to get them into trouble but not quite enough to be badly punished for it. But mostly, there's a lot of graffiti art. Some of these pictures are incredibly good. I'd never really looked at grafiti as a form of art, and maybe that tells me that I've been narrow-minded about the subject of art, but these are so good that they can't not be classified as art. You know the really famous traditional Japanese painting of a roaring ocean with huge waves? Someone has recreated it on a wall, and it looks amazing. There's real talent in graffiti, if it's taken seriously.


The buildings here are a lot different to the ones in Queensland. These look more English, with Victorian-style architecture and designs. There are small balconies with metal railings, and they just look so quaint. It's such a lovely area of the city.


Well, Fitzroy is just awesome. I much prefer it to the central city, and would recommend it to anyone. Nic and I were happy just strolling around and taking a look at things, and sometimes that can be part of a holiday too. You needn't have a solid plan for every day as long as you're having fun. It's important to slow down and look at the scenery every once in a while, otherwise you'll miss things.


That's why at the moment I'm sitting on the balcony of the hostel, just outside our dorm, looking over Fitzroy parkland with a ukulele on my lap and a smile on my face. The sun is shining, it's a beautiful day, and I'm in a beautiful place with beautiful people. Life doesn't get much better than this.
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Tuesday night, we went to Victoria Street, and went to Dracula's. It's a comedy gothic-cabaret, and it was amazing. It was thrilling, exciting, enticing and incredibly sexy. I now have a new-found appreciation for cabaret and burlesque, and will certainly be looking into seeing more shows in the future.


Like I said, it was gothic-themed. As such, all of the staff were dressed like vampyres, but not in the traditional high-collar I vant to suck your blud style, but really cleverly done. They were all wearing corsets (even the guys) and had extreme eye-make up and dark lipstick. They were in character too, as our usher described it as a human zoo where there would be a feast, but not for the audience... 


We ascended some steps and took a miniature ghost-train to the auditorium. How cool is that? I think they said they were the only place in the world to have transport inside to the viewing station. I spent the entire time clutching Nic's arm with my head down, avoiding looking at anything because I'm such a wuss. It was actually pretty scary though - from what I did see, the figures were incredibly detailed, which meant a lot of blood and guts. Yum.


Nic and I were directed to our seas, at table 302. The tables were pretty small so don't let the number fool you. It's very cleverly laid out - on the east side there is a large-ish stage, and running down from that were six or seven very long tables with chairs either side. That was where most of the people were sitting. At the end of the tables, there was a gap for waiters and waitresses (called Drakulettes) to walk through, and then there were three small raised levels, like layers, with two chairs on each. We were sitting next to each other at the very back, but that was a good thing; we were on the highest level so we had a clear view of the stage. I felt sorry for the people on the lowest level because they'd have a hard time seeing anything with tonnes of heads in the way.


There was a certain Drakulette that amused Nic and I greatly, because he was completely dressed as a she-vampyre. It was done so well that I had no idea until he yelled out 'Hey!' in an incredibly deep voice, which was so amusing. He even walked like he was on a catwalk, kept smoothing his leather skirt down, and was generally just so funny. He was a highlight of the night, for sure. God bless transsexual goths-vampyres.


There was a three-course dinner wih pre-entertainment music, performed live by the guys and girls that would be dancing for us later. It was called Spine Crusher's Jazz Band, and they performed loads of songs but with their own jazz-twist to it. It took a while to figure out what they were singing, but I managed to peg Aerosmith's Walk This Way, Gnarles Barkley's Crazy and Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out. I was a bit sceptical when Britney Spears' Toxic was performed, but it wasn't too bad, surprisingly.


The Entres food consisted of chicken tandoori with summer vegetables in a weird poppadom-like-thing-that-was-shaped-like-a-bowlers-hat. I'd never had tandoori chicken before, but it wasn't too bad. Normal chicken is better, but that stuff is alright. Needless to say, I didn't eat the summer vegetables.


The main course for me was oven-grilled chicken fillet in a light champagne hollandoisse (or something beginning with H) sauce, with a specific ype of bacon that begins with P (it was salty and yummy), with summer vegetables and on a bed of creamy mashed potato. Well, the chicken was amazing, and so was the H sauce. The P bacon was also really good, and I'm proud of myself for trying different foods. Dessert consisted of a dark chocolate coffin with coconut and raspberry mousse inside. I gave Nic the mousse but enjoyed the chocolate immensely.


We got a free cocktail and souvenir because we'd picked up an advertisement card in the hostel at King Street, and that was called the HellFire. That was a blend of strawberry and mango liqueur, built over ice with orange juice, lemonade and grenadine. Oh my stars, it was so damn good. It didn't last too long, but considering that it would have cost $15, it was the only one I had. I did have a shot calle the Coffin's Nails, which was made of butterscotch schnapps and baileys. That was tastey, but there was some weird stuff in it which I think was meant to be an imitation of the veins behind the eyeballs, and that was hard to get down my throat. But down the hatch it went, and I even got to keep the shot glass. Score!


Nic and I had a photo taken with some of the Drakulettes, and it came to be that two of them were actually in the show! That was quite cool. One was a fit drummer, and another was a fit singer. There was also a regular waiter, but because he wasn't performing in the show he doesn't get that much of a Huzzah.


The show itself was called Sin and Tonic, and it was just so good. There was stand-up comedy which had us all laughing in disbelief and audacity of some of the jokes. My dad would have definitely appreciated the humour, and as such so did I. It was rude and sometimes dirty, but really quite funny.


The performers were two girls, two guys, a drummer and a guitarist. The things that they did were just fantastic - sometimes clever, like when the girls performed with a mirror; sometimes touching, like when they sang Jar of Hearts and had her sitting in a giant heart, and had ballet in it imitating the real video; sometimes sensual like when they performed E.T on a revolving wheel; sometimes funny, like when the guy sang a song of French loss of love, and just spewed out every french word he knew.


It was incredible. Dracula's is a must-do when you visit Australia. There's one in Melly, and one on the Gold Coast. They do different shows, so you could go quite a few times and not see the same show. I'm definitely considering seeing the one on the Gold Coast too when I travel back up the East Coast.
The finale was great - we thought we had ended with The Rolling Stone's Sympathy for the Devil, which was explosive and sexy, but then they whipped out an awesome version of GaGa's Bad Romance, and just brought the house down. These guys are talented. It was worth every penny.