Why philly is awesome

For those who love trendy and hipster things, Fishtown is the place to be. It is a hotspot for lively nightlife, amazing craft drinks, and sumptuous food. The Garage in Fishtown is a bar that is housed in a garage and offers awesome music and food. All in all, Fishtown has a virtual reality lounge, many cafes, comedy cabarets, music places, and ethnic eateries. For an authentic, Chinese lunch and some frozen rolled ice cream, Emei is the perfect spot. Serious eats are also available at Reading Terminal Market.

Fairmount Park is a very massive and diverse park in Philly. The best way to explore this place is by car because it is vast. Fairmount is a great attraction because it is scattered with ancient mansions built in the s that tourists can tour. Moreover, it has hiking trails, cycling paths, and stunning views of the river. Another beautiful park in Philadelphia is the Wissahickon Park. It offers numerous hiking and cycling opportunities and also allows adventurists to wander into the woods.

South Street is another must-visit site in this city. The home values continue to rise, but it is still possible to find affordable real estate in this area. Raising a family in Philly is worth considering because it is a beautiful city with a steady economy and good schools.

Additionally, it has excellent dining options, many parks, and plenty of kid-friendly outdoor opportunities. That's what passes for decorum among Mummers, and I was grateful for it. No one seemed surprised when a living Cabbage Patch doll deliberately vomited on a little girl at a Phillies game.

It isn't that the Mummers couldn't exist anywhere else. Maybe they could. But they don't exist anywhere else, which is probably better for all those other places than it is for Philadelphia. It's why no one seemed surprised when a living Cabbage Patch doll deliberately vomited on a little girl at a Phillies game. Of course it is. The guy who played him that day is dead. Pour out some milk and cookies for him and let him be. My buddy Luke came to town to cover it. On the way to the fight, we saw one man chasing another man down Broad St.

Not the sidewalk, but the center of the street. The chasee looked concerned, perhaps because the guy doing the chasing was carrying what appeared to be a length of pipe. Luke asked me if "beating pipes" are standard issue in Philly. I could not definitively say no. Like it or not, the knucklehead minority too often serves as an avatar for the otherwise pleasant majority.

There was a time, for instance, when there was a jail in the concrete underbelly of infamous Veterans Stadium, longtime home of the Eagles and Phillies and some of the supposedly worst sports fans in America. There was a need for it, I suppose, but the hilarious part was the almost perverse civic pride in it, as though the makeshift jail underscored just how tough Philly is, and how tough you needed to be to live here, or at least go to Eagles games here.

I passed through that jail once when I was in college after trying to sneak the better part of a case of beer into a game. There were a handful of drunks down there and it smelled of vomit and that was it.

It was hardly Midnight Express. I was in and out in about 15 minutes. But the truth about the jail mattered less at the time, and certainly in retrospect, than what it said about us.

Reputation is the key to understanding Philly. How we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. It's telling that Philly is tougher for outsiders to comprehend and embrace than the city's most recognizable totem.

Almost everyone knows Rocky, and his backstory, and where to find the infernal statue -- at the foot of the Art Museum steps, a physical affront to the actual art housed inside. Tourists stop to take pictures with it all the time -- a giant sculpture of an overdrawn fictional character who lost his first fight and has haunted the city like a mush-mouthed poltergeist ever since.

If Rocky is a science-fiction movie, as Chris Rock rightly joked at the Oscars, then Philly is the planet that spawned the brain-damaged alien. The image of the scrappy underdog who gets knocked down and gets back up is precisely how so many people here see themselves.

Long after the Navy Yard in deep South Philly closed, and well after factories shuttered and moved elsewhere, so many Philadelphians I knew thought of and still think of the town as rough and blue collar.

Buzz Bissinger perfectly explained the anger and angst in his great book, A Prayer for the City. The city hemorrhaged people who fled looking for work somewhere else. It hollowed out. Many who remained behind endured protracted economic hardship.

Those were tough times, but from the soil of that struggle grew an an intense civic pride, and a collective kinship rooted in strife and adversity. It's insanely easy to navigate thanks to Walk! Philadelphia , the largest comprehensive pedestrian sign system in North America.

Installed in , these oversized, colorful signs are located throughout the city to demarcate cardinal directions, neighborhood names, historical sites, cultural destinations and more.

Between the abundant signage and Philadelphia's grid system, this city is hard to get lost in. Sure, you can get the traditional experience at Pat's and Geno's. Needless to say, they don't serve cheesesteaks with the ubiquitous Cheese Whiz here. The Phillies stadium, Citizens Bank Park, has dollar hot dog nights. The Phillies stadium was also rated 1 vegetarian ballpark. Southwestern veggie burgers, vegan chicken sandwiches, roasted veggie wraps, crab-free crab cake salad -- you can eat all these veggie things while taking in a baseball game, not to mention gluten-free hot dogs.

The Barnes Foundation is one of the quirkiest art museums in America. The Barnes Foundation is actually the personal collection of one rather curmudgeonly man, Albert C. Barnes famously established his collection in Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, rather than in the city because he felt that "Philadelphia is a depressing intellectual slum" and "the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution.

Now Philly visitors can see Barnes' Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos and 7 Van Goghs, not to mention the many peculiar ironwork pieces interspersed among the paintings, up close. But if you want a major, mega art museum like the Louvre or the Met, Philly's got that, too. After running "Rocky"-style up the steps, you'll encounter over , works of art in this world-class museum, including Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers," Pablo Picasso's "Three Musicians," Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "Bathers" painting and countless more iconic pieces.

Reading Terminal Market sells almost any kind of cuisine you can think of -- including authentic Amish food. Since its founding in the late s, the indoor market has been stocked with food from hundreds of farmers and distributors. Standing close to its original location, the market now serves up Chinese food, cheesesteaks, hoagies, fresh seafood, produce, crepes, BBQ chicken, cajun cuisine and the Dutch Eating Place, an eatery featuring true Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. Philadelphia is getting its own bike share program Beginning in fall , bike share stations will be installed throughout Philly's most popular neighborhoods and not just the wealthy ones.

The best deals can be had at happy hour , natch. All of humanity seems to have come together in a happy hubbub at Reading Terminal Market. The sprawling space has been around since , though now, its vegetable, fish, and meat vendors are compounded by dozens of restaurants, bakeries, and bars. Look for old-timey neon signs to help you make sense of the dozens of options—or just head straight for DiNic's, where the roast pork sandwich, topped with a frenzy of broccoli rabe, is practically the beating heart of the place.

Follow it up with a scoop or three of Bassett's silky ice cream. Are you in France, or? This is where Philadelphia's Main Line sophisticates of a certain age spend weekend afternoons after brunch at The Rittenhouse hotel, and where obliging boyfriends bring their Vera Bradley-toting significant others to pass an afternoon gazing lovingly at Renoirs.

Prepare to spend a few hours eyeing nearly-inconceivable amounts of Impressionist art in what feels like a very rich person's manor home. The project, which covers three city lots, is a melange of mirror fragments, tiles, and found objects like bike wheels and glass bottles, combined to mesmerizing effect. Before Prohibition, Philadelphia was a domestic distilling capital, home to whiskey producers aplenty. The 18th amendment wiped out nearly the entire industry here; but in recent years, thanks to the national interest in all things craft, the practice—especially in the peripheral northern neighborhoods Fishtown and NoLibs—has made a comeback.

We recommend starting your journey at Philadelphia Distilling, the oldest of the bunch, and breaking for lunch at Sulimay's , Philly Style Bagels, or Suraya along the way. Begin at the Visitor Center to get your bearings and start your tour—visitors can enter every 15 minutes—at Independence Hall, then stop by the Liberty Bell Center for a look at ostensibly the most famous broken item in the world.

Just note the airport-style security and subsequent foot traffic you're bound to encounter, and make sure you wear comfortable shoes—you'll be doing a lot of walking. The largest and most important works by Duchamp are here, as well as a huge collection of sculpture by Brancusi.

Pissarros, Renoirs, and Monets—all your favorites. Open since the s, this year-round market is the beating heart of South Philly, a historically Italian neighborhood that, in recent years, has also become home to pockets of Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants.

The market, which lines South 9th Street, buzzes with shops and outdoor vendors, all showing off the best of the community. No matter what brings you to the market, make sure to arrive hungry, with cash in hand.