Advertisement
We started slow and very seedy today. Last night was huge and it hit us hard. We eventually dragged our butts out of bed and headed to California Pizza Kitchen for a late breakfast/lunch. We each got a pizza ad some recovery Coca-Cola before making our way on foot to Grant Park. We walked via the Magnificent Mile on the way and stopped in at a couple of shops but we weren’t really in the mood for shopping so we continued on. We came across a protest on the way to ‘Free Palestine”, we took some photos but didn’t get involved like the hundreds of others that did.
Once at Grant Park we first checked out the Millennium Monument, then the funny head statue then to the Crown Fountain. The Crown Fountain was quite a new addition to the park. It’s an interactive work of public art and video sculpture where it displays faces of Chicago locals. Every so often there would be a giant face on the fountain at each end and it was made to look like it was spitting water, very clever and great for the kids in summer.
Next up was the centre piece of Millennium Park, the Cloud Gate.
Cloud Gate is a public sculpture by Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor. A lot of people know it probably more as the metal jellybean as that is kind of what it looks like. Kapoor's design was inspired by liquid mercury and the sculpture's surface reflects and distorts the city's skyline. You are able to walk around and under Cloud Gate's 3.7 m high arch. After some laughs here taking funny photos we walked up to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.
The pavilion was named after Jay Pritzker, whose family is known for owning Hyatt Hotels. The pavilion, which has a capacity of 11,000, is Grant Park's small event outdoor performing arts venue. After this we cut through Butler Field and the North Rose Garden before arriving at Buckingham Fountain.
Buckingham Fountain is – along with Rome’s Trevi Fountain – one of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s huge. Most people would recognise it from the opening sequence of Married with Children. The fountain itself represents Lake Michigan, with each sea horse symbolizing the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana, which all border the lake. The design of the fountain was inspired by the
Bassin de Latome and modeled after Latona Fountain at Versailles.
From there we walked to a little café in Grant Park where we got some chili cheese fries to snack on. We then slowly made our way down to the First Merit Bank Pavilion for tonight’s gig of Plain White T’s, Daughtry and the Goo Goo Dolls. We managed to book pretty good seats in the open air pavilion and the concert was fantastic. I’ve been a long-time fan of Daughtry, owning all their albums, and have always loved the Goo Goo Dolls hits. To see them perform Iris live – wow.
The concert finished fairly late and we hadn’t eaten so headed to Subway for a cheap $3 sub before Nick ditched us to go hang with his new Chicago girlfriend Leah and we had to walk all the way back to the hotel on our own, without a bodyguard.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.44s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 16; qc: 87; dbt: 0.1263s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb