USA

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Geo: 41.8842, -87.6324

Stayed in burbs with college friend Skin & it was a bit mad getting there, we had his address but no explanation that was not in fact in the city at all (or directions), so we get in taxi at the airport & show the man the address who runs us as we don't know where exactly it is - he was pretty mean actually. We go to information where an 80 year old woman helps us but apparently we are missing the post code or something so it all takes ages & of course we only have the phone number of Skins friend who doesn't know us & Skin won't be home til 5pm! So anyway she figures out what we have to do which involves a slow train to the middle of nowhere -roughville- that takes hours & then a bus to where we want. There's no train to where we want as there's only 2 trains there a day - 1 out of there in the morning & 1 back in the evening - commuterville. So we get to roughville & NO ONE speaks english, I remember being at crossroads with a map & somehow we find the bus stop without being murdered. So we a driving along feeling a biteen scared & then we see Virgin Mary Statues in the gardens & hear people on the bus speak Polish & we realise we are in Catholicville so the Irish neighbourhood can't be far! And it isn't but not before we ask for the street we want a the local library where there's a childrens group & they all come out to look at the strangers. So we find our friend by seeing a hurley stuck on the balcony. We go to local bar (really local) that night where a vicious closet homesexual keeps changing the Pool rules! And then the next day I remember how suspicious everyone was when Skin & C. were walking to rent a car - but if you don't have a car how can you rent one unless you walk there, as there was no taxis to be had.

Main thing I remember seeing Chicago White Sox in Comiskey Park, great craic but they take beer off you at the door you can only buy inside (the game is nearly incidental with all the food vending & racing balls on the big screen). And Downtown "The Loop" & Sears Tower, with 2 Irish hurlers, at South Wacker Drive and Adams Street, is the 1468ft Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world until 1997. Various companies occupy the tower (Sears has moved to the suburbs), and it's so huge that it has more than one hundred elevators. Two ascend, in little more than a minute, from the ground-level shopping mall to the 103rd-floor Skydeck Observatory for breathtaking views that on a clear day take in four states - Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana. But the most intertesting thing was the distinctive triangular Metropolitan Detention Center, where prisoners exercise on the grassy roof, beneath wire netting to ensure they don't get whisked away by helicopter. I also remember we tried to watch a movie on tv 'Mad Max' but there was so much adverts it took about 7 hours so we gave up.

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