Chicago!

[motorharp]

The bean

Friday
After great customer service from Alaska Airlines, I arrived early. Due to Chicago being... Chicago, we (me and sis) made our way to the hipster Hotel Sax, and arrived when we were originally supposed to arrive. I'm assuming I went to bed because I can't remember anything special about that evening. Maybe we were planning eating events? :)

Saturday
It was so amazingly, gorgeously, sunny and breezy that day.  We headed off to Wildberry Pancakes and Cafe a little early because the yelp reviews said there is usually a 1-1.5 hour wait. I guess when you get up and go to breakfast at a breakfast hour, you avoid all the tourists. We were seated immediately and had a great fig and bacon omelet.  We planned an architecture tour for 10 am, and since we had over-estimated the time it would take for breakfast, we walked around Millennium Park. I'd never seen "The Bean" and various other weird art "installments".

The architecture tour went up the Chicago River and parts of the North and South Branches. It was put on by the Chicago Architecture Foundation.  I don't know what it is about Chicago, but I love all the looming buildings of glass and concrete. Usually that type of thing just makes me feel antsy about not seeing a horizon.

My sis wanted to go to Fishman's Fabrics and why would I say "no" to that? We hopped on the subway (also so I could have a little practice before taking it to the airport) and decided to try to find a place to eat before. On the way, we noticed some activity on the road, and traffic being detoured, and also saw signs for Whole Foods parking detour. Lunch problem solved!  However, we couldn't figure out where it was, then asked a person directing pedestrian traffic across the bridge, and got set on the right course.  The reason for the detour?

Transformers 4!

Regardless of the quality of the movies, these are some sweet cars.  I have never seen cars that clean.  I don't think dealerships even do that good a job of detailing. And when adding these to my flickr page, I thought it was pretty cool I already had a tag for "Bugatti" (the blue and black car in this photo), heh.

And the Whole Foods in South Loop is about 4x the size of my local one. Maybe bigger. Just FYI.

Fishman's had some drool-worthy Italian wool $50+/yd fabrics, and it made sense there were tailor and uniform shops along the same street.  Nothing really jumped out at us so we veered over to Vogue Fabrics, which we'd seen on the way.  That was more what we were expecting and hit the jackpot with some great suiting fabrics.  They have huck toweling and some other specialized fabrics that are harder to find these days.

After a long day of walking, we headed back to the hotel and rested because we still had more to see - The Psychedelic Furs happened to be playing at the House of Blues that night, which was basically in our hotel parking lot.  Richard Butler still sounds exactly the same and has the same moves. It was a really good venue, too.

Sunday
We knew it was going to be rainy, but I couldn't help thinking "I left Portland for this?" It wasn't even a thunderstorm, which was also disappointing.  We had some options for indoor things - the art museum was having a "Fashion and Impressionism" exhibit and the hotel had a bowling alley, but then S said Field Museum! Yes! Let's go!  We took the L again and got mixed in with some sports fans headed for Soldier Field.  That was not a problem however, as we ended up staying in the museum longer than we expected and longer, possibly, than the game.

The Field Museum is uh-maze-ing.  We got clogged up in the stuffed animal wing.  The birds were amazing. We saw the Lions of Tsavo, which were a little weird looking to me, but then I read they were taxidermied from the original skins which had been made into rugs, so the museum had to make them smaller than they originally were. And these are not small animals - the display animals probably came up to my shoulders. The originals were 9ft tip to tail. Eek!

We saw the gem room and the jade room and the Creatures of Light exhibit which was all about bioluminescence in nature. They didn't have any actual creatures we could see, but had a great interactive high res touchscreen where you could look at the sea floor and see it both natural and glowing.  We kept trying to leave, but then we'd see something else. I highly recommend it, but with a strict game plan.

After dinner, we headed to Sephora where we found peel and stick toenail polish, among other things. Right click to view image and you can see how awesomely awesome these are.

*Not a professional foot model.

Monday
This was traveling home day, but I took a walk before heading out to the airport and may or may not have accidentally wandered onto another movie set.  I'm going to fantasize that it was Transformers again, but I really have no idea.  The L ride to the airport is also worth mentioning because it: 1) had more cool views of the architecture and 2) was faster than driving.