Chicago, IL
The city of Chicago greeted us with open arms, as our old friend Noah, invited us to stay with him and his girlfriend, Carolina (unlike the the states, the "i" is pronounced as a long "e" sound.) We arrived in Chicago before they were off work so we explored a bit on our own. We mostly just drove around the city and went down to see Lake Michigan.
Shortly after we made it lakeside, Noah called to let us know that they were off work. We shuffled back to his neighborhood, Wicker Park. Seeing Noah was a great pleasure, as we had forgotten just how much fun he was. It had been about four or five years since we had seen each other. He let us know where to park and greeted us with some big old bear hugs, until it was time to shuffle up to the apartment.
Upstairs, we had the grace of meeting both Carolina and their cat, Wilford Brimley. Carolina was a really nice, laid back girl and her and Noah are a great pair. Their apartment was upstairs from an overpriced vintage clothing store that had crazy hours, to which we never saw it open the whole time we visited. The apartment was an antique of a place that was straight out of the early twentieth century. It was quirky and old in all the right places, while still retaining a cool vibe that didn't make you feel like you were in a crummy old apartment. They did a really good job decorating the place and making it a nice place to live.
Now onto the quirky parts of the place. The whole unit is on one circuit, which means that if the air conditioner is on in the living room, then it can not be on in the bedroom. If they are both on at the same time the circuit blows. Now, it may not seem like such a hassle, but their circuits are from the early 1900's and they are not the standard circuits of nowadays, which makes them a pain in the ass to replace. If that wasn't enough they told us in the winter it gets fairly cold since their only heat source is in the living room and is a pain to heat the bedroom. They have learned to live with the little bothers and have become pros at keeping the place tip top.
After getting the tour of the place, we all confessed that we were hungry and we took it to the streets to find food. Their was a block party going on in the Wicker Park neighborhood, so that was our first stop. We waded our way through the sea of Chicago area hipsters to try to find some food. Noah and Carolina let us know that although they tried to charge admission to the block party, it was strictly donation based and they told us to just shake our heads no and walk right on through the gate. We were happy to do so. After walking through the block party and getting bombasted by hipsters and loud music, we decided to grab some gyros and falafel at a restaurant nearby.
The restaurant was very good. Jen and I shared a giant plate of craziness with a side of hummus. The craziness included chicken, rice, pita bread, and a bunch of other stuff that I have no idea what it was called, but I'll be damned if it wasn't delicious. Following dinner, the four of us walked around the neighborhood catching up and getting a bit of a tour on our way home. We walked the streets in awe of all the old houses and buildings and loved every minute of it.
Noah and Carolina were working all week, so it was up to us to entertain ourselves until four o'clock each day when they got off work. We had remembered that Frank Lloyd Wright had gotten his start in architecture in Chicago so we did a little research and found out that there was a whole section of town to view his work. Most of his work was around the area of Oak Park which was not too far, but far enough to which we wanted to take transportation. Being reminded of New York, we figured the subway/trains would be the way to go.
We walked to the train station nearest to the apartment and were turned away by the fact that we had little cash on hand and the machine did not take cards. Bummed out, we decided to hoof it down to the main line which was good half mile or so away, in order for us to be able to buy some tickets. We walked around in the muggy ninety five degree weather, and by muggy, I mean at least seventy five percent humidity. There was some definite swamp butt going on.
We reached the subway and traveled on the green line out to Oak Park. In order to reach our destination, the train must pass through a couple of rather sketchy stops, before the nice ritzy area of Oak Park is reached. It was on one of these sketchy stops that we witnessed our first mugging, ever. A girl that was sitting adjacent to us the whole ride was nose deep in her iphone the entire ride. When one of the sketchy stops came up a kid, no older than fourteen, snatched it out of her hand and took off faster that Jesse Owens. I have never seen anyone move that quickly in my life. The poor girl didn't know what to do, but should have known better and been a little more aware of her surroundings. Immediately Jen and I became aware that we too had our phones out and slowly put them in our pockets. It was a nice wake up call, to remind us that we are not invincible. Shortly after the train started moving again everyone started chiming in telling her nice things like "next time don't have such a nice phone" or "that's why you should always carry a knife." Spoken like wise men, these ladies that spewed out gems of wisdom kept talking about it all the way up to their stop. We felt bad, but there was really nothing that we could do to help. In all the years and all the sketchy neighborhoods we've visited, Chicago wins the prize of allowing us to see our first mugging. Thanks Chicago.
Oak Park was an amazing treat. Modern and mostly all turn of the century architecture has come to be one of the things that we love to look at. The area surrounding Oak Park was filled with all sorts of goodies. We walked up to the Frank Lloyd Wright Studio, which was also his house at one time, and checked out the tour schedule. Not really interested in doing the studio tour, we picked up a map of the area that had all of the houses he designed and we proceeded to walk.
The houses in the area covered everything from when Wright was just getting his feet wet, working for an architecture firm, all the way up to his later years, in which his unique style was honed in on. His early works were typical of the era and as you moved up in the years you could see the progression of his art coming into its own. It was an interesting walk through his work, as it was almost like an artist's retrospective. We were lucky to have gotten to see all of his work in a close network of streets. Later on we tabulated how far we had walked that day and it was easily over five miles, but my oh my was it worth it.
We returned to the apartment and we all decided that Chicago deep dish pizza needed to be eaten while within the city's limits. Noah and Carolina took us to their favorite pizza place and we ordered up a pizza to share. I have eaten chicago style pizza before and it was always sub par, not bad per 'se just rather okay. The pizza we had eaten here though, placed Chicago pizza a very close second to NY style pizza, because nothing can ever top NY pizza. It came close, but not quite there, kinda of like the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl (insert number here).
Noah had driven us around, since the pizza place was a little out of walking distance. This provided a nice excuse for him to give us a driving tour of the city. We drove over to Wrigley Field and it was really cool to see it all lit up. Jen was surprised and excited to see all the people on the rooftop bleachers watching the game from outside the ballpark.
Noah then proceeded to chauffeur us around downtown. As we arrived in the area, my stomach started sending me messages. I am not a professor of linguistics, but the gist of the conversation was that the pizza had made its way down into my belly and wanted it all to itself.
This prompted a race to find a bathroom as my stomach does not mess around in times like these. My stomach is a curious case, as I almost never throw up. I have a Jerry Seinfeld long run of around four years of not puking, which was caused by a wicked case of food poisoning, and prior to that it was a good twelve years or so. My stomach also has a funny way of dealing with being upset by causing me to find a toilet unless I want soiled underpants. Everyone in the car was on the side of that not happening.
Noah did his best impression of pre-death Dale Earnhart, and found a Target that would serve as the deployment station. We made it to the store just in time. I quick stepped it though the labyrinth of people and obstacles to make it to the restroom. I made it just in time, and in the words of my grandfather, "it was over before the buckle hit the floor."
Now that I was in good shape again, we continued with our night driving tour of the city. Noah took us around to look at all the big old buildings and even around his old jogging route that included a bunch of semi creepy looking churches. We had a great time that night, despite my crazy bathroom adventures.
The next day was started out with breakfast that came recommended by a former Chicagan, Kyle Montoya. He told us of a burger joint called Kuma's Corner. The restaurant is a pub style hamburger place that is a metal heads dream come true. It has burgers named after famous metal bands. There was a Metallica burger and a Slayer burger along with various others like Pig Destroyer for a pulled pork sandwich. We arrived at the place and were greeted by heavy metal music playing on the house speakers and a line that was about 15 or so people deep. We had heard too many good things about the burgers there and what better way to start off a day than with a nice breakfast of ground beef.
There was a wait of about twenty five minutes, but we lucked out and only had to wait about fifteen as a spot at the bar opened up for us. We glanced over the menu and finally decided on the Mastodon burger. Now, Mastodon the band definitely has some good songs, especially their early work, but Mastodon the burger is a masterpiece through and through. The burger was a nice huge mound of ground beef that was topped with deep fried onion strings topped with cheese and bbq sauce all on a pretzel roll, that really tied the whole thing together. The burger was incredible and was easily in the top three burgers I have ever eaten category. There are a ton of adjectives that I could use to describe it, but none of them would do it justice as it is pure greatness in the form of a hamburger. It was well worth the wait, and I would go back and wait even longer next time and not even think twice about it.
After our incredible hamburger and fries breakfast, we headed downtown to walk around in Millennium park and take in some scenery. The city was setting up for Lallapolooza that was taking place the following weekend. The weather was being uncooperative with us as it looked like it was going to rain every couple of hours but instead would just get sunny and cause the humidity levels to jump even higher. The mugginess factor on top of the near one hundred degree weather was a death sentence to most. Luckily, we are not most, but we sure did come close.
Chicago's museums host free days for most all of the museums in town. On this day it was free admission to a photography museum and the museum of contemporary art. Our first stop was a trip down to the photography museum. The museum was doing a retrospective of some guys work that was not all that impressive and thus I do not remember his name. It was mostly pictures of other pictures in which he then painted on top off. It was much more in the field of printmaking and painting than photography, and thus was sort of boring with the exception of a couple of pieces. As we climbed up to the top floor, though we were greeted by work of another artist that was far more interesting.
The photographers name was Linda McCartney and she did an interesting take on nature and bird photography. She took rather large photos of trees and shrubbery with birds in them, and even had info on the birds photographed in the framing. The catch though, is that when you look really close, you notice that the birds are fake. They look real enough, but they are either dead and stuffed or are really good fakes. This allowed her to set up really interesting shots that normal nature photographers would most likely not be able to get. It was a great concept and was really cool to look at.
We then walked around the parks and saw the infamous fountain from the Married with Children intro. We walked all through Millennium park and saw the Frank Gehry designed amphitheater. There was a sweet little man made stream running through a section of the park and we took it upon ourselves to dip our hot sweaty feet into it. It felt great. We then caught the train to the Contemporary Art Museum.
The Art Museum was having an opening and therefore it was jam packed with people and events going on. It was also filled with some very interesting art work from working artists. It's hard to get into too much detail as there was four floors of pretty darn good stuff in the building. One really notable piece was a huge structure that balanced from the ceiling of the fourth floor and hung over the open part of the museum all the way down to the first floor. It was a huge tree log that was balanced out by a cluster of wooden products such as chairs, benches, tables, canoes, etc. It was interesting mostly because the weight of the tree was the same as such a vast amount of products. It was an overwhelming surplus of furniture that equaled the weight of the simple tree log, and on top of that it was very well put together as it was beautiful to look at.
Jen and I then hopped back on the trains to make it back to the apartment so we could cook Noah and Carolina some dinner, as a thank you for letting us crash. We picked up some sausage and made a nice pot of spaghetti with marinara sauce. The food hit the pot and we waited ever so patiently. Noah and I tried to hack his wii so he could put pirated games on it and run emulators to play old nes games on it as well. After tinkering around for far too long, dinner was done and we were not. We took a break from working on the wii and ate some dinner while watching the Aziz Ansari comedy special. Following the dinner and a good session of laughter, we got back to work. After much meddling, we finally got the bulk of the work done and called it quits. We watched a little TV and then said our goodnights/goodbyes as they had to get up for work early and wanted us to sleep in.
Once again we would like to thank Noah and Carolina for being great hosts and putting up with our shenanigans. Chicago was a really fun visit and is definitely on our list of places to visit again. Besides, I already want another burger from Kuma's Corner.
Number of Frank Lloyd Wright Houses in Oak Park = 27
Number of Muggings Witnessed = 1
Number of Miles Walked in Oak Park = 5.2
Number of Hipster "Vintage" Clothing Stores in Wicker Park = Too Many To Count
Glad you didn't have to poop on the side of the road like you did with that Gyro... good times good times
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