the lazy weekend

It was a lazy Saturday morning and I was thinking of ways to spend my unplanned weekend when I opened my browser to start the day checking mails, a usual ritual since almost three years now. As usual, the home page google.com opened up on my favorite browser. Not many of us would have google.com as their home page, I assume. The reason being obvious. How many of us have creative things to search for, the first time your browser starts up. Obviously I am not one of them. But I chose google because of the light interface and the time it takes to come up. It is fast and also doubles up as an indicator of the internet connection speed, so I know how many mail accounts I can check in ten minutes :)

So this fine day, March 17th, as I was going through the same ritual, I observed an interesting logo with three green leaves, on the google home page. Now a new logo on Google home page would mean that the day was special in some way. Any google
holiday logo fan would know that. Their holidays logos are so famous! Intrigued by the green, simple logo, I thought I would find out what it was about. A single click on the logo told me it was St. Patrick's day.

St. Patrick's day?? Wow, I thought. All I knew was that there was a St. Patrick's Cathedral two blocks away from the place I stay and I guessed there would be some kind of celebration there and I was happy I had something to do on this lazy weekend. Little more googling helped me discover it was lot more than just celebrations that mark the day. The Cathedral hosts one of the biggest parades in New York on St. Patrick's day and millions of people witness it, as I understood. Wow, that would be a thrilling start for the weekend, I thought.

So, in an hour, I set out to witness the awesome parade myself. So many people. I have never seen such crowd. An India-Pakistan cricket match would have come close but I haven't seen that one either :). The Avenue was closed both ends and groups marching in the parade with music, discipline and cheering from the audience. Green was the color of the day. Irish was the theme. Green hats, Green t-shirts, Irish flags, captions, logos were seen everywhere. It was fun to be witnessing such a grand event. Various colleges, schools, offices, departments had their groups marching in the parade. The whole city was right there, playing audience to this grandiose event.

I wondered how I did not know about an event of this grandeur, before hand. May be it was so obvious, no one needed to discuss it. Now, the sale of green t-shirts the night before makes sense.

Let the pictures describe more . . .







How much would I have missed if google was not my homepage!! :)

Coming back to cricket, the world cup has started and already half of the Indian fans have lost hope. The rest of the matches are for the other half.

Which half are you in?