Friday, March 26, 2010

In the last 20 days I've...

-Gone home to Iowa for a week over Spring Break (very fun, very relaxing)
-Written some papers for school
-Read approximately 100,000 pages for my classes
-Got a sunburn when I went outside to read here:


(I'm not complaining...it was a beautiful day out. I sat on the bench on the right side of the picture and read. I didn't anticipate not understanding the article and reading it 4 times, so after 4 hours I came home confused and sunburned.)

That's it. Someday I'll have time to go check out this great city I'm living in...hopefully it will be sometime soon...I'll make sure to take some pictures.


Sunday, March 7, 2010

Happy (Hoboken) St. Patty's Day!

Hoboken gets a head start on the St. Patrick's Day festivities...celebrating 11 days early. It seemed like the population of this city doubled on Saturday when I was at the Hoboken St. Patty's Day parade, which basically consisted of a lot of bands, bagpipes, firetrucks and Hobokeni dignitaries. This parade had several grand marshalls, the Irish policeman of the year, the Irish fireman of the year, the Irish woman of the year and, you guessed it...the Irish man of the year.

Although the major highlight was the corned beef and cabbage sandwich I had after the parade, there were other good parts:

The parade committee! This was a rather large
committee...I'm pretty sure each float had a
separate committee member in charge of it.


You can't see this very well, but it is a
fireman smoking a cigar on top of a firetruck.
For some reason I found this hilarious.


The random hecklers hanging out of their
apartment window. Hoboken had some harsh
punishments for public drunkenness ($2000 fine and a
night in jail), which was in response to last years shenanigans,
so people kept the party indoors this year...although there
were plenty of crazies out last night on my way home.

The kid with the green hair

I have learned that every police department in the area, including
the New York/New Jersey Port Authority police, have their
own bagpipe brigade. Interesting.