Starting Over is Scary

Downtown Detroit

As I am sure everyone knows by now, the Superbowl is in Detroit this year. So the town has had all sorts of activities this week. The downtown is shut down to traffic and is like one huge street fair. A drunken street party. Lots of Pittsburg fans have come up because they aren't that far away. So my "cousin" Bill is very into sports of pretty much any kind. He called me up and invited me to go downtown to see all of the sights. I was thinking, yeah right like I care about the Superbowl. But then I thought, "Hey why not? You are just going to sit at home alone if you don't go so at least you will get out of the house for a few hours. Besides it could be a lot of fun and you have never been to downtown Detroit, except the airport. Plus at least I can say that I saw some of the activity for a Superbowl once." So there was my little pep-talk to myself. And I decided to go. What a sight it was too. Tons of heated tents full of stages for bands to play, new cars coming out, food, arts and crafts, an indoor beach volleyball court, an indoor surf wave, and tons of people. There was also ice sculptures of all of the football teams logos, an ice skating rink, and all sorts of sound and video equipment. Bill had been through everything on Thursday night so he took us around to all of the sights. There were tons of people there but for the most part the crowds were really friendly. Very drunk, but friendly. We wandered the streets for a few hours, had dinner at a Thai restaurant, and then checked out the bars in a place called "Greek Town". I thought that all of the Grecian Key fans should come out here and we could go check that place out together. I am trying to remember some of the more colorful things that I saw. We saw several girls dressed in very short skirts and heels trying to walk around in the snow. I also saw a man with a girl thrown over his shoulder. She was completely passed out. We watched the guy performing on the Blues stage for a while but I can't remembr his name. I was impressed with the downtown area too. You hear all these bad stories about the area and how dirty it is but the city really worked hard to clean it up and there were cops all over the place for crowd control. It felt reasonably safe and everyone that I saw was having a really good time. It was chilly but not too bad until around 9 pm. Then it started to snow pretty good. And kept getting harder. Turns out there was a winter storm warning for Detroit. The picture is of me walking through downtown when we were trying to find the car to leave. The front of my jeans was soaking wet and my shoes were soaked through. We got 6 inches in just a few hours.

Yeah it was freezing!
So as you watched the Superbowl today you could see the places that I got to walk through everytime that the cameras panned outside and showed the buildings and the activities. It was very neat and that is probably as close to a Superbowl as I will ever get. I even found myself sort of interested in the game this year. I hope that isn't from spending too much time with Bill.

posted by Erin @ 11:56 PM