Skating on St. Patrick's Day!

The day began with five of us deciding to go ice-skating at the Millennium Park in downtown Chicago. It is always difficult to get parking in downtown Chicago and today we expected it to be worse because of the St. Patrick's day parade. We decided to take the train to downtown and reached the Prospect Heights station at 11:30 to catch the 11:37 train. Surprisingly, the station was empty. We thought maybe nobody uses the station on the weekend. It was 11:50 and still there were no signs of the train. Usually, if a train is running behind schedule there is an announcement made but here there was none. One of the guys who saw the train schedule online said that the train was supposed to depart from Mt Prospect at 11:37 and that's when it occured to us that we had come to the wrong station!Prospect Heights instead of Mt Prospect.Phew! On weekends the frequency is not all that good so we finally caught the 12:37 train from Arlington Heights. The train was crowded for a weekend but it was great to see almost the entire train dressed in green for St. Patrick's Day. After we reached the rink it was time to put on the skating shoes! Boy! it was a struggle to stand straight after wearing those shoes so I was thinking how people do all that dance and stuff. In the beginning Humpty Dumpty had a great fall lot of times and one or two times Humpty even ensured that people close to him also fell down because he made contact with them when he fell down. The problem was the opposite also happened :(I went down because of somebody else's feather touch. Two things I clearly remember during my skating. One, a kid fell down and almost at the same time I also fell down. The kid was about to cry when his dad told him(pointing at me) see that guy also fell down :-). I guess I became an 'example' for that kid there :-). Two was the RJ's announcement that the Indian Supreme Court had dismissed the obscenity case against Richard Gere for kissing "Bollywood" actress Shilpa Shetty :D. After doing some skating with great music playing in the background I finally completed one full round without falling even once for which I must be applauded and rewarded:D.
After the skating we went to see the Chicago river which is dyed green for St Patrick's Day. I havent seen a "Green" river before but I think I like the traditional color more :-). On the way back the atmosphere in the train was truly electric with people making a lot of noise and one guy was happily drinking beer in the train. He was warned by the Conductor but he was so drunk that he said ok and went to sleep :D. All in all a great day but one thing I missed out on was "Green" beer :D.