Chicago in the Rain

Second day in Chicago! Jetlag does funny things to you. Had it now for the third time and it always amazes me. First I tried to start the day at 0:23, then realized it's silly, and repeated the procedure at 4:28 and finally started the day at 6:30.

In an attempt to be as American as possible, we started the day slowly as we would meet our friends at 11:00 at  Patino's Grill for a brunch burger. According to the "locals" (two Italians), it is the best burger joint in town.



*Drumroll* It was a reeeeaaaaaally tasty Chicago Burger.



Afterwards, we made our way to downtown Chicago to get the lay of the land. The center of town is referred to as "the Loop", because all the 'L trains (short for "elevated trains") follow a loop above the city and then go back to their outskirt destination. Everything enclosed by this loop is referred to as the Loop. Inventive, I know :-D

We took the brown line which led to a rather amusing little incident. For some reason the automated announcer's voice seems to drop the 'p' at the end of the word loop. You know how these voices always give a split second too much time between words. In exactly that monotonous lingo he/it said then "Going .. to .. the loo' .. on the brown line". Now I am not sure if all of you know that the loo is another word for the toilet, but going to the toilet on the brown line is a clear euphemism for diarrhea in my books 😂

 Now, it is the first time that I have been in a major US city and actually visited the center of town. You see all the images of skyscrapers and you watch the movies and still it is not quite the same as standing in the middle of it. It really looks like in the movies, but the sheer size of it, gives it another dimension that pictures just cannot grasp. I had the same feeling when I was in New Zealand. The pictures there remind me of the way it felt standing there looking as far as I could get and feeling a little dizzy looking.

It was raining again, so the impact of the visuals are most likely changed as the tops of the skyscrapers were actually hidden in the clouds... which was also the reason why we did not bother going the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower).

   

Judging by what we have seen and what attractions Chicago has, it comes across as a fairly artsy city with a lot of projects going in that direction. One example of that would be the Millenium Park which is a rather large park that is host to a whole array of exhibits, the most famous of which is "The Bean". The Bean is officially known as the Cloud Gate, a 10 by 20 by 13 m, 100 tons heavy... well... bean-shaped piece of metal. It is actually quite cool to take pictures with it. An idea that pretty much every single tourist in Chicago seems to have... all at the same time. When you walk underneath it, it is like a labyrinth of mirrors ;)

       

Other attractions were a fountain that regulary displayed average Joes from Chicago, which was kinda cool to see the synchronisation between recorded image and the water works. Finally, an artist showed what you can make out of used car tyres... Check it out for yourself below.

   

From there we went further into the centre of town to have a stroll. On the way I learned a bunch of random facts about Chicago, that I will now blurt out in no particular order.

• The highspeed car chases in the latest Batman movies were filmed in Chicago
• The city was the blue print for Gotham City (also Batman)
• Chicago was founded by a Haitian man called Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable who build a trading post near the great lakes which later developed into Chicago
• The Wrigley's tower (from the Chewing Gum) has a clock where all digits are "W"s, because it is "always" Wrigley's time

Unfortunately, it was quite cold and windy, which meant that going to the lake shore was not pleasant, so we decided to postpone this until later. It will rain tomorrow again, but at least the temperature will be higher than 8°C (14°C to be exact), nonetheless we will keep outdoor activities for later. Tomorrow, we will start off with the planetarium followed by the Surgical museum and then finally the museum of contemporary art.

Now I am just chilling out watching Scrubs while I try to fight my jet lag a little further back until I can go to sleep :)

Does any one of you know cool places to go to in Chicago? If you do let us know in the comments below 😁

Reactivation! - Travelblog into the USA

As I already told some of you, I will re-visit this blog to use it again as my travelblog like I did for my honeymoon in New Zealand.

This season features episodes from the USA. So we arrived in Chicago after a lengthy and uneventful, 9 hour long flight and to no ones surprise, it was raining. Not a steady British drizzle, but pouring it down liter and liters of it... or should I say "gallons". Yes, numbers do not make sense here anymore.

Temperature, a staple among the numerical orientation points once it comes to telling people how the day was, just does not make sense. The weather yesterday was in the mid-40s and it was, pardon my French, arse-cold and windy and wet. 40s?!? as in 40°C? Nope, 40°F. C to F, Cow to Foxtrott and suddenly far too hot, becomes... not pleasant in different ways 😏

Anyways, I digress. So we made our way here. Tried to contact our landlord for the keys and spending about 17€ in the process... the discussion about roaming charges for the mobile phone should be extended to the US 😏

Our place is quite far out from the centre, but it is a nice quiet residential area so far on first impressions. We like it. The strange this is that nothing is really different to home. Sure bigger cars, but the general way of running things is kinda samey. They just prefer the colours red, blue and white a bit more than we do, that is about it...

Once we got settled, we took a bus to Lake Shore, lake being the Lake Michigan, one of the great lakes and boy let me tell you it is big. There, we met up with our Italian friends, Mattia & Serena, who moved from Leuven in Belgium to Chicago to extend on Mattia's research career. In the process, they had their first baby. Ladies and Gentleman, please meet baby-boy, Thomas.

 

Those two settled in really nicely into the lifestyle in Chicago and tomorrow, we'll explore the centre of Chicago together with them. Unfortunately, the forecast promises more rain, but we will make do. There are plenty of things to do here.

On the way back from Mattia and Serena's, we were fighting the jetlag, so that we could go to sleep at a semi-good time. I tried to not fall asleep by standing for the 30 minute bus ride... The result was that I hit my knee on the chair as I fell asleep standing up, rudely awoken by the malicious position of the chair in the way of my buckling knee. Just to give you an idea what the pre-zombie jetlag stage looks like, I took a picture 😁

 

Let's see what tomorrow brings! Till then.