Chicago; The Windy City

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Chicago

I flew into Chicago from Bristol very early this morning, we left home at 3am, but it’s the only way to make the most out of the meagre 5 weeks we have to tour the USA and Canada. Not enough granted, but all the time we can afford! Consequently I have been up for 25 hours roughly, excluding the napping done on the journey!

I flew Air France, and was delighted to be served camembert on the flight; only the French J My friend, Olivia, was arriving into Chicago on a different flight and as luck would have it, was delayed by 4 hours. I made good use of the extra time available to me at the airport and duly sat with my bags and observed everyone coming and going. The hellos and goodbyes are truly emotional, and also American men have not yet discovered the trainer sock. Rather on the other hand they pull their socks half way up their calf muscles. Sexy indeed.

Flying in, it really is remarkable how different America looks from the air. It’s all straight lines and grids and symmetrical, it doesn’t take much brain power to work out that the towns are planned and haven’t grown up that way.

When Olivia finally arrived, we made our way to our youth hostel and then set out exploring. We made our way along one lovely straight main road and discovered this weird shiny blob thing. It turns out this ‘blob’ reflects all of Chicago back at you. This ‘blob’ as I so eloquently christened it, is really called cloud gate, know to locals and tourists alike as ‘the bean’. It is apparently inspired by liquid mercury and distorts the reflection of the city. I have to say, it is really pretty cool.

Y'all got nice legs ladies, I wanna put some salsa on them and lick it all up

- what charm Americans possess! Tack that with a man offering us a ride as he drove in the other direction and you get a wonderful picture of this fine country where a kind someone would turn their truck around just to give us a life. Sadly, we were more in the mood to walk.

On our second day in Chicago we decided to walk to Obama’s house. The Europeans’ favourite president... well I can’t say it was entirely worth it, as it is under pretty secure guard and surrounded by high trees, but it was a lovely long walk in the summer heat... the one redeeming factor of the morning was Olivia being shouted at by an armed security guard for taking a picture of the Obama house...

In the afternoon we took the Lonely Planet’s walking tour of Chicago and saw some interesting features of this often overlooked city. There was America’s first skyscraper, the Chicago board of trade – where we managed to walk in on some kind of tour and get an explanation by a trader, I figured it to be a complicated version of pit, but I didn’t really understand - and this strange sculpture that we couldn’t really work out what it was meant to be – at first sight I went for Lion, and Olivia went for woman, but in the end, I think we just about agreed on horse.

When we were crossing the river, we saw the sets of transformers 3, where there was debris everywhere – we kept walking past crowds of people waiting to see some shots and the stars... and this was going on the whole day. On our way home walked past people everywhere, and just randomly decided to go down this side street where there were a few people – and it turned out that we had a really good view of the set. About 2 minutes later a car flew up in the air and blew up and about 30 men with machine guns ran out from hiding places and were shooting up into the sky. It was truly a surreal experience.

Teatime of day two was a classic Chicago experience at Pizzeria Uno - the apparent inventor of the Chicago deep pan pizza. And you know how they talk about American portion sizes – well indeed, the rumours are correct, Olivia and I only managed half of an individual pizza. It was very interesting and so different to anything that I have eaten before; it’s almost pie like, with a huge slab of what I can only describe as sausage meat surrounded by cheese and peppers, pepperoni, tomato sauce and more cheese layered on top.

After tea we went to watch Billy Elliot the musical, we had spontaneously decided to buy tickets for it earlier in the day. The theatre was awesome, similar to an old fashioned opera house, very grand and impressive. I’m so glad we did this spontaneous act as the musical was really very good – the young boy who played Billy was vastly talented, although his Geordie accent was interesting to say the least. Americans are loud, so they say, and I’m inclined to agree – we were sat next to a group of them who laughed loudly, were shocked loudly and clapped, yes you got it, loudly. But they enjoyed themselves and so did I.

Day three was a relaxed affaire. We spent the morning on the beach of Lake Michigan. The water was freezing and the sun was hot. Beautiful.

In the afternoon we went up the Sears tower. Which since 9/11 has been the tallest building in the usa. The glass bottomed cubes protruding out the side of the tower made the skyline and views pretty impressive, apparently, on a clear day, you can see 4 states from the top, it has 103 floors and is 283 Barack Obama’s tall – my ears popped 4 times on the way up.

Chicago: Beautiful City, Lovely People, Lot’s to do.

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