Chicago Blues Festival ...

This weekend found me travelling to downtown Chicago to visit the Chicago Blues Festival. My friends Preeti and Vikram were going to meet me there, so I opted to take the train into downtown to avoid the pain of negotiating the traffic and the parking woes that plague Chicago. A mile from the station and I found myself in a huge traffic jam with only 10 minutes left to catch the train. Trains in this place are weird - on weekends, you have a train into Chicago once every 2 hrs!! If I missed this one - I was done for until the next one decided to trundle by.
Luckily for me - the train was also 15 minutes behind schedule and I managed to get into it rather comfortably. Soon, I found myself at Chicago Union Station ...

The city of Chicago has free trolleys that run in the summer to ferry people from Union Station to the various tourist spots. I boarded one of these and went to Grant Park - the destination of the Annual Chicago Jazz Festival.
The place was rocking and jiving and humming with activity. You could hear the Jazz bands from a distance - Saw some bands from Louisiana and some from Mississippi too in addition to the ones from Chicago. The music was so catchy that you found yourself swaying to the best even though you didn't know the song! The was a series of jam sessions where they would play music and each musician would try to out do the other - kind of like a "jugalbandi". Watching these performances live, cheering and applauding the musicians was a great experience.

And of course, there were the promotional Food stalls - Connie's pizza, Billy Goat's Tavern, Siam kitchen to name a few. All the big names in beer were there too - and those stalls were crowded!! People were having a chilled out great time.

Levi's had a Signature Fit machine on display as well. You had to walk in and stand in a kiosk that gave you the name and size of the Levi' fit that fit your body the best! For someone like me, who can never find the perfect fitting jeans - this was awesome!

After trying out the custom fit machine, we walked into a Livestrong booth where they were giving out free Power bars ... these are a new kind of cereal bar that was being promoted there.

BP also had a promo, where I won a Tshirt! Wow! This was in addition to the various beads and necklaces that were being handed out as we walked around.
Great music, good food , and awesome weather .... What else could I have asked for?