Third of July Festivities

Chicago has its big 4th of July fireworks display on the 3rd, and it coincides with the last weekend of the annual "Taste of Chicago" festival, one of the most popular in the city. I don't attend the "Taste" because the idea of eating standing up in huge crowds of people on a hot July day just doesn't appeal to me for some reason. I do like fireworks, though.

People are encouraged not to drive on days of big gatherings downtown, especially the third (this year a million and a half people gathered at the lakefront). Chicago has a decent public transportation system with a great suburban rail network, there is no reason to have to drive downtown most days and on summer days with large events it is almost impossible to find a place to park if you do.

For some reason, people don't listen to the warning, and downtown turns into a parking lot. On days like that I really don't envy emergency crews trying to get through the mess.

The evening for me was mostly a chance to play with my camera - one thing I did learn, it's hard to get a good representative picture of a million and a half people at night while being jostled in the crowd (for the fireworks I used a tripod, but for all the other shots it wasn't really feasible).

(I'm also learning that Blogger is probably not the best or easiest program to use to post and format text and pictures together - getting the different pictures situated around the text is a chore.)

St. Patrick's Day 2

Chicago's skyscrapers get into the holiday spirit for a lot of seasons and St. Patrick's is no exception. It's a neat sight to see (especially if you know what the colored lights on the tops of the buildings signify). But as I just learned, it's a little tough to get a good picture of the lights against a dark sky. I particularly found it tough to get a good shot showing how vivid the green lights are.

St. Patrick's Day in Chicago

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.