Summer in the City of Champions

In June, as many of you know, the Penguins won the Stanley Cup! The whole city was incredibly excited, and an estimated 375,000 turned out for the victory parade - that's more than the population of the city! After missing the Super Bowl parade last February I wasn't going to miss this one. I met my friend Bryna downtown on parade day. After the motorcade of VIPs passed by, we decided it would be fun to walk in the street behind it, and we crossed over a barricade and started walking next to one of the high school marching bands. Nobody seemed to mind and people even cheered and high-fived us as we passed by. We marched all the way down to the end of the parade route and the stage was in sight. Another sneaky maneuver and we had made it all the way to the media and VIP section right in front of the stage! Luckily no one seemed to notice that we were the only ones without special passes around our necks. We only had cell phone cameras so the pics aren't great, but the content makes up for it. Above is us with Iceburgh, the Penguins mascot. I love the people standing on roofs in the background.


Here's us with the stage and big screen in back of us. It was great to be so close to the action.

It's a little hard to see but that's Evgeni Malkin on the video screen, pouring champagne into the Stanley Cup. Right after this his parents joined him in drinking from it. Mr. and Mrs. Malkin, nicknamed "The Genos" by Pittsburghers, became local celebrities after attending lots of games during their several months visiting from Russia. Mrs. Malkin's homemade soup is thought to have been responsible for much of her son's late-season success.

Mario at the podium, and that looks like Staal next to him.

Crosby.

The Cup!

Love this picture - from the front page of the Pitt News with the headline City of Champyinz. It has everything you could want in a Stanley Cup celebration photo: Lemieux jersey, homemade tinfoil Cup, excited girl cheering with her arms in the air, and... the guy who just couldn't wait to eat his Cheetos. And that's no snak-pak folks, that's a full-sizer.

The Steelers received their Super Bowl XLIII rings in a ceremony before game 6 of the Cup Finals. Now that's a ring! Some of the Steelers players even left the celebration early to attend the Pens game, and maybe they brought the championship vibe with them!

And, for those of you who are interested, here are the places I photographed for Stephen's birthday blog - I know, it's been two months! But still. The first photo I used was of this huge sculpture - it's by Richard Serra, in front of the Carnegie Museum - and I took the original pic from inside of it, looking up. The inside is like a cathedral of steel and rust open to the sky. Unfortunately, some see it instead as merely a convenient urinal.

The next pic was of some paint-splattered pebbles - I've loved to visit them since I was little. They are under a big fence on the CMU campus, and above is me leaning against it. It's a tradition at CMU that various campus organizations paint and repaint the fence every week or so, with different colors according to their preference. This has been going on for as long as I can remember, and as a result the stones underneath have become intricately multicolored - beautiful.

Another pic was of me in the Allegheny Cemetery, near where we lived in Bloomfield last year. A great place for walks, complete with Egyptian tombs, huge obelisks, duck ponds, deer, geese, woodchucks, the occasional bird of prey to stare us down from a tree branch, and even two resident cats. One cat is black and one white, and they each have their own little shelter that someone made for them, to keep them warm and dry.

The nighttime cityscape pic was of the view from the Panther Hollow Bridge, facing the Carnegie Library in Oakland. Here is a view from the bridge during the day - with Michael Chabon's famous Cloud Factory in the background. As I was walking across, I came upon this strange string creation woven into the chain-link fence. I'm not really sure why it is there - whether a public arts project sponsored by the city or just something an inventive passerby decided to do. It has an unofficial, unsanctioned feel to it, like someone secretly made it in the dark of night. The phrase vigilante macrame came to mind as I looked at it, although it isn't technically macrame. I just like the sound of it.

Here are several more of the creations, with a view of the Cathedral of Learning. Going in the other direction across this bridge takes you to my new house... But more about that next time. And no more cell phone pics - I finally got a new camera.