At the old ball game (Philly, Part 2)

On Sunday, the plan was to get up early, hit the famous Philadelphia Museum of Art, then head down to the Citizen's Bank Park for a Phillies game. Well, so much for planning. We made it to the museum withjust enough time to take a lot of silly pics of each other mimicking Rocky's famous run up the steps (c'mon, EVERYONE does it!), and sadly had to skip the art.

We made it to the south end of the city just in time for the start of the ball game. Was it ever a great scene! Unlike at a Blue Jays game, the day's attendance was over 40,000 and there was a real fan spirit in the endless sea of red shirts. We got into it as well, Adrian buying a Phillies cap and me a (ex-Jay) Roy Halliday Phillies t-shirt. The ballpark itself was very cool and had many levels, so we really only stayed in our nosebleed seats for three innings before we decided to go exploring, and didn't return for hours. What's great about the Phillies' ballpark is, if you don't mind standing at a railing, there's a great view from every angle and level. We snacked and drank our way around the park, trying soft pretzels, Budweisers in plastic pint-size bottles, nachos, Bud Light Lime in crazy-looking aluminum bottles, etc. And aside from the food and the views, it was actually a really good game, with several Phillies home runs and a great bunch of team-specific cheers — plus, what has to be the oddest mascot ever, The Phanatic (what kind of creature is it, exactly?). It was also a little jarring to have to listen to "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch (rather than "OK, Blue Jays").

The sky was ominous and it eventually started raining hard enough to cause a rain delay... by this time we were hanging out at field level behind right field, and it was the 8th inning. While a lot of fans left sometime during the hour-long delay, we were loving it, as rain delays are non-existent during Jays games at the Rogers Centre! We met some quirky locals as we all huddled in the sheltered areas, and marveled at the amount of water on the field (as ballpark staff squished and plodded through it). After the rain ceased, it took nearly half an hour for the groundskeepers to squeegee the water off the field, and the Phillies managed to score a few more runs before the end of the game, when the giant neon-lit Liberty Bell above the outfield came alive and started ringing (love these ballpark quirks!).

And though the rain dried up for the rest of the game, we somehow got caught in another downpour between the field and the subway station, and found ourselves drenched all over again! We spent the evening wandering the area around South Street (a place one of our friends from the ballpark told us "is full of freaks and weirdos"), which wasn't all that full of weirdos on a Sunday night, but pleasantly full of kitschy shop signs, tattoo shops, and restaurants. By the end of the first two days we'd done so much walking we felt like we could draw a map of downtown Philly with eyes closed!