St. Patrick's Day Parade

"But, wait, isn't St. Patrick's Day next Monday??"

Yes, I was just as confused as you are when I first heard that the St. Patrick's Day parade for New Haven was being held on March 9th. But thankfully from hanging out with people on Friday night I was able to find out about what others were doing for that day.

We ended up all meeting outside of Richter's right around the beginning of the parade and by "meeting" I mean dodging already obnoxiously drunk people and staking claim to a small portion of the fluid filled sidewalk. But as bad as that description sounds, I actually had a great time.

It was nice to take in the sights and sounds of the parade, with the colorful flags and the massive thumps of the bass drums, but to take these in along with a nice beer or a swig of your flask, now THAT's a parade my friend...yay for public drinking!

Now I know that makes me sound horrible and very luscious, but everything in moderation, right? In this case, it was nice to kick back in a way and have a beer among friends and instead of doing this around a bar, take this social activity and enjoy it outside along with the pomp and circumstance of a parade. It was actually very nice, apart from people that took that socializing bit a little too far and were already fighting or staggering around by the start of the parade.

So here are some shots taken from my little cellphone camera that don't really do much justice to the scale of the people there (yup, they had helicopters circling around measuring up the amounts of people), but you at least get an idea.










Once we were finished watching the parade some of us decided to grab some real food and real drink over at the only non-crowded place in the middle of downtown, The Omni.

Normally you'd think "well, it's the hotel bar right in the middle of downtown, right in the middle of everything really, why would you even think of going there, wouldn't it be completely overrun by people??" Well, follow the logic with me as to why it was no overrun by people:

1. First off, outsiders to New Haven simply don't know that this place exists.
2. Even if they do know it exists, they simply write it off as being too expensive since it's The Omni Hotel's bar and grill.
3. Because it is in such an auspicious location, people don't want to deal with dress codes or adhere to any type of good behavior on the St. Patrick's Day parade and would rather grab a sandwich at subway.



Hence, we were able to glide up the elevator and have a nice meal and a nice beverage 20 stories above the chaos and not have to pay too much extra for it. Yay for logic being my friend...well at times at least.