I solved my problem.

My problem was two fold... I had a lingering old install of hive which was what my shell was defaulting to. I removed the second bad install of hive. The second problem is that the latest version of cdh seems to be broken for parquet. There's a bunch of missing jars. I followed the following guide and I am now able to use parquet files.

http://analog99.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/setting-up-stats-db-in-hive/