Everybody's parade

[jethrien]

On the way home from writing group yesterday, I stumbled into the city's Puerto Rico day parade. I love parades, so I stopped and watched for awhile.

I really hope there were no emergencies in our city yesterday.

I knew we had a big Puerto Rican population, but man, the city really turned out for this one. (We have ethnic pride parades every other weekend in everything but winter, it seems. We have a really diverse population, which is pretty cool.) It started with the police cars. Then then police motorcycles. Then the walking police. The police color guard. The police cadets. The police van. The sheriff's cars. The county police cars. The K-9 unit car. The correctional facility truck. The correctional facility prisoner transport van. The customs and immigration truck. The SWAT team armored transport.

The fire trucks. The walking firefighters. The firefighter color guard. The Civil Air Patrol. About six vans from the substance abuse hospice. The mayor. The city council. People not on the city council but running for city council. Our congressman. An entire float dedicated to our congressman.

This all interspersed with the usual dance squads, classic cars, church-built floats, bicycle fleets, community groups, random dudes driving with a random flag stuck somewhere. And one old guy with a bright yellow bicycle labeled "taxi" wearing a beer helmet filled with pepsi and a Groucho Marx fake nose.

After about 40 minutes, I was hot and thirsty, so I continued on home. But I could hear them still going for at least another 20 minutes. Impressive.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Apparently yesterday there was also a big celebration of Krishna's birthday in NYC. I came home on the PATH in the middle of about five Indian families with small kids, all of whom got off at my stop.

I also had the misfortune of taking the exact train from my parents that went by the Mets stadium when the game got out.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Oops.