Back From Chicago
Posted on September 7th, 2004 @ 9:30 PM EST
We had a great time while visiting Chicago. The weather was excellent and the temperatures were in the low-80s each day. The first day there we walked down to Millennium Park. My favorite attraction in the park was the Cloud Gate Sculpture. The photo above is a reflection off of the sculpture. We walked around the streets outside the hotel and stumbled upon Boston Blackies where we had dinner. They had an amazing half-pound hambuger covered with bacon and onions for only $6.50, which was voted one of the top-five burgers in the city every year for the past 15 years. That evening we saw “Show Title Deemed Indecent By FCC” at the Second City comedy theater. The theater has established itself as a Chicago landmark and treasure. It launched the careers of great comedians such as John Belushi, Chris Farley, Mike Meyers, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, and many more. The show paid homage to how radically our culture has changed and was given its name because the actors want to help increase awareness of how much the FCC is trying to censor our freedom of speech.
Caroline didn’t get back from the conference until late in the afternoon on Friday so we didn’t get a chance to do a lot of sightseeing that day. We ate dinner at Buca di Beppo which is a family-style Italian restaurant. The food was served in portions that were meant for sharing and their “small” was enough to feed two to three people.
The next day we went to the Shedd Aquarium which is the largest indoor aquarium in the world. It took us over two hours to go through all of the exhibits (Amazon Rising, Pacific Northwest, Caribbean Reef, Fishes From Around the World, and Wild Reef). We ended up eating dinner at Baja Fresh because several friends had suggested it was good and they don’t have any locations near where we live. The food was excellent and is nothing like Taco Bell. After dinner we walked down to the Navy Pier and watched the fireworks over Lake Michigan. I was kind of surprised at the number of fireworks during the show. Their weekly show certainly had a lot more than what my local town of Wilmington, NC has on the 4th of July.
The last full day we were there we went to the Art Institute of Chicago. A few of the famous paintings that we saw were A Sunday On La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, American Gothic by Grant Wood, Water Lilies by Claude Monet, Paris Street; Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte, and The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso. There was an exhibit set up for Seurat which displayed 40 paintings and drawings that ranged from rich yet delicate crayon studies to oil sketches on small wood panels, to nearly full-sized paintings which were all studies for A Sunday On La Grande Jatte. The exhibit also had a full-size digital reproduction print that showed how the painting looked when it was first seen by the Parisian public in 1886, before the painting darkened somewhat. After visiting the art museum we browsed through some of the shops along the “Magnificent Mile” including the Apple store that recently opened, Virgin, Pottery Barn, Burberry and several other stores. We then went to the Goose Island microbrewery and took a tour of the brewery. They were very generous with their taste testing and let us try 10 of their beers. My favorites were their India Pale Ale, Red Felt Ale, and Hefeweizen. We ended up spending around four hours at the brewery and chatted for several hours with a few other people we met on the tour.
Overall my wife and I really liked Chicago. We both agreed that it’s the city that we like the most of out of all the large cities we’ve visited. The food was amazing wherever we ate, the city was really clean, the weather was nice, and there was plenty to do and see.
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