The Reading Terminal Market

The reading Terminal Market

For lunch we went out to the Reading Terminal Market - a public market buzzing with dozens of take-away food stores and you can see a few Amish people there. I grabbed some Indian food there and spent a good time roaming around clicking pics. A live band performance made the space lively.

Next on our schedule was meeting with people from Mayor's office on a project called New Urban Mechanics. The meeting was hosted by the IVC Philadelphia at their office. It was interesting to know about the Mayors Challenge, initiated and funded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which was a competition inviting the American cities to generate innovative ideas to solve the major challenges of their cities. This is where the idea, New Urban Mechanics, put forward by Philadelphia got selected and funded. The idea is about identifying the social entrepreneurship ideas in the cities and supporting them. While the Mayor's office, Philadelphia, still need to work on the granular details of their project, I was delighted at such initiatives taken by the local governments in US. With the decentralization of power, the local governments here have more say and power in running their cities the way they want.

Tomorrow we'll be leaving for Chicago, the windy city, where the temperature is close to -1 Celsius. Well the reason why Chicago is called a windy city is not what you would be thinking right now. Here is something I picked while googling - "If you had always assumed that Chicago earned its nickname as the Windy City from the chilly gusts coming off Lake Michigan, you would be wrong. The city is windy, according to most local legends, because of the hot air bellowing from politicians."