LOVE Park

(as usual, click any picture to embigganize)

So Philly has these park blocks where an entire city block is made into a park, usually with a fountain or some sort to appease the inner naturalist in every city dweller. On Friday, between orientation, we grabbed some hoagies (sub sandwiches to you West Coasters), from a place that had Boar's Head meats, and had lunch at the JFK Plaza, aka the LOVE park.

The hoagies were delicious, I had a tuna club with bacon and it was unbelievably good, so good in fact I forgot to take a picture, so take my word for it. Also at the park was a kids concert, where kid bands played 3 song routines. Here's a few pics.

The drummer in this first band we saw was also the lead singer and he was having such a ball, he looked like he loved being up there.

Parents and family of the kids up on stage were taking pictures and videos of their performances, while I was secretly taking pictures of them...muahahaha.

The kid in this band had such a wicked guitar, I dubbed it the BAT guitar because it was matte black with red outlining and reminded me of the Batmobile from the old Adam West Batman TV show.

This band reminded me of the School of Rock band, the guy in the background with the shades, black shirt and guitar was Jack Blacking it, kind of filling in as backup vocals but his voice was so much louder and stronger than the girl lead singer that he was practically lead singer. Plus the assortment of non-standard rock band instruments (saxophones and trumpet) made it seem all the more School of Rockish.

Note the Tommy Chong impressionist on the sax.


There were also an assortment of bikes belonging to bike messengers or hipsters.

Bike messengers finishing up their lunches and going through food coma.


These guys were nice enough to strike a pose for me. I think the guy on the right is slightly confused as to what I meant by "strike a funky pose guys."

William Penn, who designed Philadelphia standing atop City Hall, which is apparently the tallest masonry building in the world, larger than the US Capital building, and most expensive to build according to this site.


The Comcast Center, the tallest building in Pennsylvania, completed June this year. It's new and shiny.

This picture taken from the park, the fountain in the foreground and an interesting looking building in the background, I tried to find the name of the building but was unsuccessful, on my ride home one day, I'll solve the mystery.

The Penn Railroad station, nice looking building front. Also taken from the park.

There's a bunch of motorcycles and scooters running around the city.

The motorcycles apparently are safe because they're parked willy nilly on the side walk and nobody bothers them. But the scooter owners on the other hand seem to be somewhat more paranoid based on the size of the chains used to shackle each scooter to the Earth!

Candid photo of some of my friends from school watching the kid bands.

Later in the day, me and another guy rode our bikes down the Schuylkill River and it rained on one side of the river and sunny on the other side, that was sort of strange, but it was fun. We didn't get too wet. In the evening we had dinner with the guys above and some drinks and talked for a while, that was fun. Saturday evening, there was a party thrown by the second years and that was also fun, got to know more people from the program. Anyway, this is the last weekend before the school starts and I still have my applications to finish and Monday's lecture to go over. Counting down 30 years till retirement...sigh. Hope you had as fun a weekend as I had.