Adventures in Chicago: a Summary in Pictures

Disclaimer: This blog post contains no material of deep, lasting consequence.

You see, a friend of mine and I took this past weekend to go on an adventure, and I want to tell you all about it!  We decided to road trip to Chicago!  Before we begin, I do recommend taking a mega bus or something to go to Chicago.  I was incredibly blessed that my friend was willing to drive--being a passenger was quite traumatizing enough, thank you!  Had I been the one driving, I probably would've needed several therapy sessions upon my return home, where I am suddenly less likely to complain about the Iowegians!

We stayed in the Acme Hotel, which is apparently relatively new to the area, but it was a pretty cool hotel!  They brought us breakfast for free (a perk of making reservations online), their coffee was delicious, and the hotel itself had a LOT of personality!  Let me show you what I mean:

This was in the corner of the mirror in the bathroom!  And they glowed!

 There was also a ginormous hand above the bed, a chalk board on the door (upon which we wrote Philippians 4:13 :) ), and the shower head was on the ceiling so the water fell straight down!  This detail didn't turn out to be entirely practical for hair washing purposes, but when I changed my mind on the shower, the bath tub was pretty comfy too!

Our first afternoon/evening in Chicago consisted of deep dish pizza (I will never look at Godfathers the same again!) and the Magnificent Mile, being a mile-long stretch of road full of shopping!  Granted, most everything was out of this starving college student's budget, but it was fun anyway!

I also must say, I've never been in buildings that tall!  Our hotel room was on the 15th floor!  I've never even been in a building that had 15 floors!  One of the malls that we went into on the Magnificent Mile had seven levels (and a crazy fast elevator!).  This picture is from the top floor, and I really don't think the picture does it justice!

Water Tower Place, from the 7th floor

Of course, most of us have seen pictures of city skylines from places like Chicago or New York City, but being there is entirely different!  It's like when I first saw the ocean, it was crazy because it was so huge, and I knew that it was so deep, and I knew that the point where all I could see of the ocean ran into all I could see of the sky was only the beginning, that there was Europe and the rest of the world and so many different people and cultures beyond that horizon.  My mind was so blown that I took dozens of pictures--and then when I came home, they were just pictures of light blue on top of dark blue, and they totally didn't capture the magic of standing at the edge of land and water, staring at the edge of water and sky, and being so close to the rest of the whole entire world.

The Chicago skyline is kind of the same thing.  There are these massive buildings everywhere that loom up above you.  If you're standing too close, you can't even see the top.  For us, sometimes we couldn't see the top anyway because it was kind of rainy and cloudy, so the buildings just vanished into the clouds.  And as we drove by, the closer buildings passed faster than the further buildings and it made it look like the city was doing one of those royal ball dances with lines of people rotating and switching.  I think the skyline is what kept me from feeling claustrophobic the whole time we were there.  The skyline drew my attention up--that's where all of Chicago's space is!  Most of what we did was within walking distance, and we didn't have to drive much to get to a new radius of walking distance, so where as I used to think that Chicago was big, now I know that it isn't so much "big" as it is "tall"!

Oh yeah, and they don't waste space on trivial things like parking lots.  Instead, they charge your left arm to use their parking garages: one of which in particular that I wondered several times if I shouldn't be demanding someone to be paying me to be there!

The entrance to the Millennium Park parking garage is between two opposing lanes of traffic.  It then takes you down underground, so it feels like you're being eaten alive.  Then, you know how usually there are things like lanes, arrows, directions, things like that to guide you into a normal parking garage?  Nope, this one (after it ate you) left you in this concrete chamber the size of about half a football field with gates to get your ticket and find parking off to your left.  No lanes, options, nothing, just a big concrete space!  The first time we parked here, we parked on level 3.  We had to go on foot DOWN to level (I kid you not) 2.5 (Seriously, even the button in the elevator had it labeled as 2.5!), and then take the elevator UP to level 7.  Aside from the 2.5, makes sense, right?  Well the second time (the fact that we parked here twice is evidence of the scarcity of parking in Chicago), we parked on level 1, went up one flight of stairs, and found daylight.  Somehow.  Not to mention that this vast parking garage was full of disorganized caverns of cars connected by creepy concrete hallways, random doors, and stairs and escalators that we never did figure out where they led to.

But hey, we got PLENTY of laughs out of that parking garage!  And we also learned to never trust maps under ground, only the ones above ground tell the truth!

One of the creepy hallways in the Millennium Park Parking Garage

We also went to the Navy Pier.  The up-side to the weather during our stay was that there weren't very many people at the Pier, so we didn't have to deal with crowds too much.  The down-side was that it was freezing, and thus we didn't spend much time actually on the pier.  We ran out, snapped some cool pics, and then ran back inside.

Me: I can see the top of the building!
My friend: It's too short!

Inside however was a completely free museum of stained glass!  Unfortunately, all of my pictures from this adventure are up-and-down, and I have not yet figured out how to make Blogger rotate them :(  Alas, I am not as social-media-savvy as I pretend to be.  Just rest assured, the works in there were gorgeous!  I doubt the pictures really did them justice anyway.

We also went to the Shedd Aquarium, which involved waiting in line for an hour, about forty five minutes of which was outside in the cold (though they did put up a tent type hallway on the stairs to block the wind, and that helped a lot!), but it was worth it!

They had more than just fishies in the Shedd Aquarium, and this guy was cute!

I meant to get a picture of the frog, the creepy dude on the other side of the display was totally an accident!

Judging from Facebook with my many Iowa City friends and acquaintances who have been to Chicago, going to "the bean" and taking pictures is kind of a must.  So we did!

This is up underneath the middle of the bean.  It was trippy!!!

And last, but a terribly far cry from least, was the Art Institute, which I shall return to some day so that I can spend an ENTIRE day in there!  Kind of like the magic of standing on the ocean or actually looking up at and driving around the tall buildings of Chicago, I was walking around the Art Institute seeing the actual pictures and sculptures of things that I studied while working on my associates degree, and standing there looking at the piece that the artist's hands actually touched was totally different!  I also definitely fell in love with Monet this weekend!

My dad thinks I'm nuts, but I STILL love Jackson Pollock!!!

So there you have a very brief rundown of a few highlights of my trip to Chicago!  I have now been in a 15 story building, eaten Chicago deep-dish pizza, and been eaten by a parking garage.  I have been the most hard-core window shopping of my entire life, and I have seen Monet's "Water Lilies" in person.  I have also experienced being in a big city rather than the suburbs of Nebraska and Iowa.  I've learned that I like the elbow-room of the Midwest, and I don't think I could ever live in Chicago (beyond the simple fact that I'm a sheltered Blondie who could probably easily take a wrong turn and end up getting kidnapped by the mafia or something!), but I will be going again some day!