Irish River

Grant was lucky enough to have 4 days off this weekend, which also happens to be St. Patrick's Day weekend, so we decided to drive up to Chicago to enjoy the city life for the weekend. Our friends Dave and Kenna (from our ward in Provo) were kind enough to let us crash at their place and hang out for the weekend.

This morning we took the train downtown with them and watched them dye the river green which was pretty cool. St. Patrick's Day in Chicago is a pretty big deal, huge parade, everyone wearing green and drunk by 9am. It was definitely entertaining and we had a lot of fun.The river is always kind of a murky shade of green but for a few hours before the parade they put some special concoction in that dyes it a crazy "emerald" shade, which was really cool to see. (The dark spots are shadows from the buildings).
You can see the color of the water better here...there were a few tour boats and a bunch of kayakers doing tricks for the audience.My favorite part of Chicago is probably that the river runs through the whole city so there are bridges on just about every street. The twin buildings behind us were crazy residential buildings. The bottom half below the division you can see in the middle is parking, the top half are apartments with round balconies off it. And below is a place for "boat parking." Can you imagine taking the elevator down from your high-rise apartment, jumping in your boat, cruising out of the city and onto Lake Michigan. It would be amazing!

After the river, we made our way over to Millennium Park and saw all the fun stuff there, the pavilion, BP bridge, skating rink, the bean, etc. The architecture of it all was amazing.Dave, Kenna, me, and Grant in front of "the bean."A picture of our reflection in the bean. A little distorted but fun.Everyone was pretty into the Irish spirit and we saw a few dogs dyed entirely green..Grant was especially amused by this.
The mini bull...not quite as large as the New York one but picture worthy anyway :)

Walking over the river on the way back to the train station. We had a fun St. Patrick's Day weekend... I love holidays (even though today I realized I have no idea what St. Patricks' day is except for an excuse to eat weird food like corned beef and drink lots of green beer (not me of course :)