St. Patrick's Day in Chicago is like the 4th of July in Washington, DC: you have to experience it to believe it (and it helps if you're under 30 when you do).
Yes, they actually dye the already green Chicago River an even more florescent green. What's even stranger is that the dye that goes in the water is orange, it isn't until it reacts with the river water that it turns green. I tried to capture a bit of that in the pictures here.
Because of the early fall of Easter and holy week this year, St. Patrick's Day lasted over a week in Chicago. The city always has two parades: the southside parade - more of an informal neighborhood thing; and the downtown parade - the official city sponsored event. The southside parade is the Sunday before St. Patrick's and the downtown parade the Saturday before. Because Sunday the 16th (the day before St. Patrick's) was also Palm Sunday, the southside parade was held a week early on the 9th.
I didn't have the guts to get too close to either parade, for both parades the drinking starts well before noon and doesn't stop I guess until the last man is no longer left standing.
2 comments:
The word green came up as a link, but when I clicked on it I got "a this site has exceeded alloted bandwidth". Is that me or you? PM
It's the website, they must have gotten overloaded by St. Patricks Day revelers checking out the guys who dye the river.
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