1,000,000 suckers
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2008
1
15
26
Trip End
Dec 30, 2009
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Saturday, July 4, 2009
We got motivated to go at about 11 and took the subway to Independence Hall to see the rest of that area of the city and to walk a few blocks to Penn's Landing to go to the ice cream festival. We got there about 15 minutes before the parade ended and saw the huge fiasco of protestors, visitors, tourists, and other tents that were blocking the pretty views we had the day before. Good thing we did this yesterday too. We wanted to cross the street but the way the route was set up we would not have been able to. To kill some time we walked into the liberty bell hall again just because everyone was watching the parade and there was no wait. We found out the bell tapping ceremony would be roped off with a blocked view and thought it would be worthless and decided to not wait around for it
Fireworks!
.After we left the Liberty Bell the parade was just ending and we got to cross over and walk around a few more blocks of Philly while seeing Benjamin Franklin's grave, Christ Church, and the Betsy Ross house to name a few. We were still debating to see the bell tapping ceremony when we realized that were only a few blocks from Penn's Landing and decided to just continue on to the ice cream festival [all you can eat for $5].
The ice cream festival was the kind of chaos I expected the whole city to be in. We had to wait about 25 minutes to get in to a small tent [probably 40 ft by 100 ft] loaded with 20 ice cream vendors shoveling out scoops of ice cream at break neck speed. The tent was completely full of people and moving around was almost impossible. All being told I had 12 scoops in about 45 minutes with my girlfriend having about 11. She wins for ice cream, as most of mine were Philadelphia water ice, which is eeriely similar to Italian ice, but we wont tell them that. I still won in quantity however. We agreed that the melon, cherry, and lemon water ice flavors are the best and almost went back for seconds if it would have been easier to get to the table.
At this point we were beyond full and decided to walk back to Independence Hall area again, then head back to the hotel to check out the pool
Fireworks!
. Unfortunately the pool was pretty tiny and full of kids that I did not want to swim with [i.e. many]. We decided to take a brief break before walking over to China Town for dinner. This area was pretty nice, with some great markets and delicious restaurants representing almost every country in South East Asia. We settled for a Zagat rated Malaysian restaurant and got some delicious noodle dishes and Indian curry based appetizer with a free dessert bean soup at the end.Having our share of food for the weekend it was a painful waddle back to the hotel, where we took another break and then started watching the hordes of suckers filing their way into the parkway for the concert to get a "good" seat for the show and fireworks. After resting we went and walked up into the parkway seeing touts selling water for "$1 here, $3 up there" and "Get your souvenir t-shirt" which was of Michael Jackson. I quipped that I didn't know Michael Jackson was playing at this show, and got weird looks. Once we got into the thick of things and 500,000 people around us we decided to go back to our hotel, which was surprisingly difficult as we were fighting against thousands of people going the opposite direction. I joked that we should be charging people to come see the show from our room charging $30 a pop, but we decided against it.
The rest of the night we enjoyed the show of 1,000,000 suckers piling into the parkway, while listening to the concert and fireworks on our TV while having the best view in town. The only disappointment was that the fireworks show lasted a grand total of 19 minutes and the finale was only 20 seconds long [by my determination of the word]. But that is ok, we still had the greatest time watching it in our private room, with a great view, and watching 1,000,000 suckers trying to get back to their hotels shutting down the traffic in the entire city for over an hour, while we were happily asleep
