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.