Chicago Weblog

Woke up to massive amounts of snow falling on downtown.  Fortunately, the free breakfast at the hotel included biscuits and gravy so I was able to steel myself for the ordeal.

We took the brown train and rode around town a little, looking out at all the snow falling.  At one stop, there was a herd of young people dressed up in various holiday costumes, apparently going to a party or theatrical event; one woman had a huge polar bear head hat on, and I’m sorry I do not have a picture, as it was rather impressive.

The train eventually brought us back into town and we visited Marshall Fields (Macy’s) to see the big tree in the Walnut Room.

For lunch, we went to Watertower Place, which was packed to the gills with people.  Nasty weather does not deter Chicagoans from their Xmas shopping, which I suppose makes sense, as otherwise they probably would never get any Xmas shopping done.  Me, I’d get mine done by September.

On the way back to our hotel, we passed the Hershey’s store and decided to drop in.  Oh, what a wonderful aroma.  We stayed for chocolate cake and chocolate coffee and still had trouble tearing ourselves away.

We also passed the Hyatt Park Chicago, and decided to see if there were any Christmas displays there.  Whoa!  No, not even a tree in this extreme minimalist lobby.  But off to the side, in a reading area, was a display of some obviously very expensive trilobites.  What a trilobyte-crazy town this is!

Another classic Chicago museum, built on the grounds of the 1893 Colombian exposition.  They had put their WW II submarine in a new exhibit since I was last there as a kid, so we decided to see that first, before the crowds show up.  This exhibit knocks it out of the park, and is a must-see if you get to Chicago.

You’re first led through a brief introduction of the start of the war and the build up of the Battle of the Atlantic.  This is followed by a recreation of the capture of the submarine.  Then you walk into the giant auditorium and are confronted by the huge nose of the sub right in your face.  It makes quite an impression.  The walkway leads you away from the nose down the side and underneath the boat.  It looks much larger than I expected, based on all the movies I’d seen of men crowded together in a tiny little metal box.  Sure enough, though, once you enter the sub, unlike the Tardis, it is not larger on the inside, but much, much smaller.  Turns out that all those ballast tanks take up most of the volume.

This is the galley that cooked all the meals for the crew of sixty for the three months they were scheduled to be at sea.

And here are the “hot bunks” in the torpedo room.  Few of the men on board ever saw the sun during their tour.

Other cool exhibits included a huge model train layout (CVH:boring), several real trains, a robot cow milker (CVH comes from a family of dairy farmers), a baby chick pecking its way out of its shell, and for the season, dozens of Christmas trees decorated in various national styles from around the world.

That evening we walked around the corner from our hotel to get some Chicago-style pizza, and finally took the subway down to the giant two-story-over-twenty-five-hundred-square-meters Walgreens inside the Loop at State & Randolph.  CVH has always maintained that if you can’t find it at Walgreens, you don’t need it, and this store certainly seems to prove that maxim (they have a sushi chef).

After leaving the Field Museum, it was still bitterly cold outside, so we took a cab this time to the Art Institute rather than wait on the bus.  I don’t know how the natives handle this weather day in and day out for months on end.

The Big Deal for Christmas at the Art Institute was the display of a huge Neapolitan creche.  Now this was something to see.  A Sunday school project gotten way, way out of hand.






This whole thing stood about five feet tall and twelve feet around.

We also saw the exhibit “Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine”, a very broad array of American painting, sculpture, and craft dealing with food and dining culture in American from the colonial times to today. I particularly liked the Claes Oldenburg Fried Egg that splayed over a large section of the floor.  You can understand why CVH was interested in this exhibit.

Of course, she also had to have her Ferris Bueller moment.

Zero degrees Fahrenheit.  Wind chill at the waterfront of twenty below.  We bundle up and head off towards the Field Museum of Natural History.  It was so cold standing outside waiting for the bus that I thought CVH was going to die.  After she killed me first.

But we got to the museum; the first time I’d been there in fifty years.  I was surprised that some of the exhibits in the main hall that I seen the last time were still there!  And they were looking just as good after fifty years (unlike me).  This really impressed upon me the skills of the conservators there.

One of the displays that was different, though, was the dinosaur out on the main floor.  I’m not sure what happened to the old one; I heard dark rumors that it wasn’t the dinosaur paleontologists once thought it was, and it had been moved outside the museum, or possibly even deaccessioned.

However, we weren’t there to dwell on the negative; instead we went to see the new dinosaur, the eight million dollar Sue: the best T-Rex ever discovered.

Back to 1893

Last Christmas, I read Devil in the White City by Erik Lawson, a wonderful history of (among other things) the 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago.  This year, the Field Museum dug deep into its collection to show off some of the items that were displayed at that exposition so that you could see some of what people saw back then.  I can only imagine how amazing this all must have been in those days when there was so much less competing for people’s entertainment span of attention.

This is CVH touching a piece of smoky quartz from Austria that the 1893 visitors also touched.

The visitors also saw fantastic animals.

Then, while CVH went off to wonder at the Hall of Birds, I visited the reconstructed tomb of Unis-ankh. I had a personally guided tour.

Parts of the tomb, such as the cartouche of Unis-ankh (with the hare) seen here, are from the actual tomb, carved over four thousand years ago. This stuff just boggles my mind. There were human mummies, cat mummies, a recreation of a cat-goddess shrine, and original boat from the Middle Kingdom which had been used to prove the carbon-dating apparatus at the University of Chicago. There were several dioramas depicting the death rituals in great detail. A very interesting and informative exhibit. Meanwhile, CVH saw a bunch of dead birds.

It took us a while to find the cafeteria (we got lost in Africa first), but there we had wild mushroom soup, pumpkin soup with carmelized pears, and a chicken frisee salad. Refreshed, we then went to look at Sue’s real head (the one downstairs is fake because the real one weighed too much to mount on the rest of the skeleton). Here we found out more about Sue and her history, including the fact that the museum paid eight million dollars for the skeleton. Not mentioned was the museum’s alleged debt difficulties.

Once we had some food in us, we set out to brave the elements and see the Magnificent Mile of stores on Michigan Avenue.

It was very cold.  The skyscrapers were pretty, all lit up in red and green; all the trees along the street were strung with lights in their branches.  And Chicagoans do it the right way – they string the lights up in the branches.  Some parts of the country just wrap the trunks in lights which makes it look like a forest of stumps.  I never have understood that temperament.
There aren’t many of the old fashioned Christmas window displays that I remember from when I was a little kid. However, we ducked into the Mariott to see their tree and found a wonderful display.  I love Chicago Dogs – that hot dog with mustard, onion, pickle relish, tomato wedge, sport pepper, and a dash of celery salt – and at the Mariott hotel, they had the world’s largest Chicago Dog.  No ketchup, of course.

The display consisted of over 1400 pounds of gingerbread, 500 pounds of sugar, and 600 pounds of candy and decorations.  It was really cute.

But it was so cold, way below freezing and aggravated by the Chicago wind, that we had to buy some more outerwear halfway through our walk.  Fortunately, there is no shortage of outerwear stores along Michigan Avenue in Chicago (as you might imagine).

Upon landing in Chicago, we took the train into town and our hotel.  Our hotel room was several floors directly above Eataly, the new hot trendy Chicago eatery backed by Mario Batali and his associates.  We went there and found it indeed full of wonderful food.  The place is dedicated to Earnest Hemingway for some reason that I didn’t take time to find out.

At the grand opening of this restaurant/deli/grocery store, people were lined up around the block.  Like locusts, they stripped the store bare.  The owners had to shut it down for a few days while restocking.  It had just reopened when we were there.

This is a picture of the giant wood burning bread oven that they have on the second floor (I sneaked into the bakery area when no one was looking).  This oven was brought over from Spain on a container ship and assembled, brick by brick, in the bakery. The oven is powered solely by sawdust that was compressed into logs by hydraulic pressure. Each tile within the oven has a different temperature and the loaves of bread have to be moved to account for these variations. Every ten minutes, the large plate in the oven is rotated by hand and finished loaves are removed from the oven and newly formed loaves are put into the oven. You can see many bags of flour on the left; this one oven goes through a lot of flour.

Here is CVH eating raw fish at the raw fish bar.  Personally, I do not care for raw fish.

 

Why would anyone go to Chicago in the winter for a vacation?  That’s a good question.  But CVH wanted to see the Big City Lit Up For The Holidays, and Chicago in December certainly fills that bill.

Since the cost of parking is so high in downtown Chicago, and the weather is so iffy this time of year, and Southwest had a sale on flights to Chicago, we decided to fly up.

We drove to the airport.  Upon entering the parking lot, where you stop to get your ticket from the machine, I noticed that they had taken down the sign they used to have there that told you what the daily parking charges were.  This did not seem an auspicious portent.  But we parked, got through security, walked way down to the far end of the terminal (our flights always seem to take off from the last gate on the terminal for some reason), and arrived at our plane not too early nor too late.

However, then the departure of our plane was delayed because the plane next to ours was broken and they wanted to take all the people on that plane, who were trying to get to Las Vegas, and put them on our plane to Chicago instead where maybe they could catch a connecting flight.  Now I have no problem sharing our plane with people who had suffered this turn of bad luck, but unfortunately, once all those people were loaded onto our plane, our plane weighed too much to land in Chicago.  So they had to call for a truck to come suck some of the fuel out of our airplane.  That took longer than expected, because there was a problem with a fuel control valve that balances the fuel between the left and the right wings (which was a piece of information that as far as I was concerned they didn’t really have to share with us).

Once we took off, though, we were in Chicago in no time.  I really hope those people trying to get to Las Vegas were able to make a connection that day because they sure weren’t dressed for the weather Chicago was going to dish up that evening.