Chicago Sojourn

Chicago

~not the musical about women who kill people~

rather, the city with the overwhelmingly tall buildings

     Today, I was not in the land beyond the violet mist, though obviously I have here returned for this Saturday evening time of blogging. But today, my mother and I took an adventurous sojourn in the vast, tall city of Chicago. Well, technically we arrived here/there yesterday, after a six- or seven-hour drive (or more--I'm not sure--I kind of loose count after two or so), and we did do a few things, including eat the fancy, upside-down, thick "Chicago style" quote Pizza unquote (which was so fancy and different, it was hardly even pizza and more some other kind of... dish) and go to a fancy kitchen store Mom thinks she might have seen on Food Network, but today was our full-out city-exploring day of general adventurous sojourning. In fact, I am still quite tired from it--my feet are still tingling spitefully after all the miles I put on them (we reckon it was at least five miles that we walked)--and also I still have my Norwegian post open in the tab at left to finish (I was so close to finishing last night, I really was, but I hit the cut-off and now I wanted to get my thoughts about Chicago out before I went back and finished it) and other than my feet being tired, I was up late last night and early this morning and it's been a huge and exhausting day (and for the record this still isn't a run-on sentence) and so this post is probably going to be a general, skim-over, summary of events. Throughout the day, I kept thinking about things going, "ooh! I can blog about that tonight" and "ooh! I'll post this picture in my blog post tonight!" and even "ooh! I'll make this cool video of the train for my blog!" but I think I'll have to do a more reflective post with more pictures and possibly video(s) later. 

     So, the gist of our day ran thus: I think it is safe to say that we are staying somewhere in a suburb/sub-town called Naperville. It seems to be a fairly large suburb/town that makes up the outer skirts of Chicago and so hopefully this information won't give you too much of an advantage in your (the internet at large's) ongoing quest to stalk me. So, we went and caught a train (which was the first time I rode on a train since we were in Germany in Fall 2008, five and a half years ago) and it was a double-decker train so I convinced Mom to ride on the upper level :). At this point I would like to reflect a little more on the coolness of the journey and finding the balance between taking pictures and looking at scenery not through my camera, but again, I'm kind of pooped. So, then, we arrived in the city. There was initially some struggle to find our way, which I would go into, but after a short time we managed to find the restaurant run by a Top Chef winner at which Mom had been yearning to dine, called, "the Little Goat", which had the logo of a cute little goat all over, yet oddly still served goat meat (I had amazingly spiced dark chocolate chip crunch pancakes and a superbly rich toffee shake). From thence, we planned to attempt to catch a cab at some point to go to Navy Pier, but since we were so full from the delicious food of the restaurant, we decided to walk a little first. Then I got taking pictures, and we kept walking. And then Mom was stopping to look at our map (an item which we used quite a lot) and some friendly guy in a yellow shirt asked if we needed help finding anything, and then we learned from him we were over halfway there, and so we kind of went, what the heck, let's just keep going, and so we kept walking, and then we eventually stumbled upon Millenium Park. At this point we'd already walked, like, two miles, and so we rested on a bench for a while, circa five minutes, during which time Mom mentioned an Alaskan survival show where Mom had seen these people who would walk for forty-five minutes and then rest for five so that they could keep going. Then I convinced Mom to wander around the park a while, and then we really just stumbled upon the giant silver jelly bean (pictures and further explanation later) and, well, suffice to say, walking 'neath its belly was like walking into a wormhole. 

     So, then, somewhat refreshed from our short rest and proud of adding another thing to our list of Chicago-y things we'd done, we proceeded to walk still farther, headed on our quest to Navy Pier. (We had both picked out our top thing to see, pretty much, and Mom's was that restaurant of the lady who won Top Chef, and mine was Navy Pier, which has a giant swing ride, which is my favorite type of ride. They just feel so like flying. I could swing on them nigh all day :). But from Millenium Park we came onto that big shopping street, Michigan Avenue, which also had lots of street performers. So, it just made sense to check out a couple of stores as long as we were there. We bought fancy chocolates that I can scarcely wait to try in a fancy chocolate store after getting a free sample of smooth, creamy, gooey, amazing vanilla caramel. We went into a four-story tall Crate & Barrel, a kitchen and interior design kind of store with lots of brightly colored modern furniture. And I got to ride a bunch of escalators ;) I kind of have a hyper-little-five-year-old attitude towards escalators. Sometimes, in the mall, I'll ride them just for the sake of riding escalators. 
     Then, we finally made it to the American Girl Doll store, which was amazing. I know some people would say that I'm kind of too old for American girl dolls, but at this age, I consider myself a veritable connoisseur of all things American girl doll. I am a collector and a scholar of the beautiful historical dolls, in particular. I do still take a certain joy in arranging lovely displays of my dolls and things and in collecting things. I also proudly cited various facts to my mom as we perused the store (she mostly resting on a soft chair, as we had gone probably another couple miles. My fatigue was outweighed by my childlike jubilance at the amazing plethora of dolls and museum-esque historical displays), facts such as that Caroline Abott (whose mini-doll I got today--on sale for half price!!--only $12!) is the only doll whose official era-year does not end in a four. Julie is the doll of 1974; Molly, 1944; Kaya, 1764; Kit, 1934; and so on and so forth, but Caroline alone is 1812, specifically so that her story can match up with the start of the war of 1812. Not only am I an epic book nerd, I am an American girl doll nerd, which is kind of a niche market for nerds. I was trying to give a brief summary of my day, wasn't I? That Norwegian post is really going to get cut short. 

     So, in order to get to the American girl doll store, we'd had to walk, like, 5 blocks past the turn-off to Navy Pier or something, so we now had to walk back. I did suggest, though, that we walk out towards the lake first so that we could walk along it on the way to the pier, so that was really neat. We saw lots of horse-drawn carriages on that shady, tree-lined side street leading up perpendicularly to the road that ran parallel to the lake, which, my mom is what you call a "horse girl", the kind that grew up with cowgirl boots practically glued to her feet, and so she would have loved to go on a ride in one of those, but for one we couldn't see where people were getting on, for two we guessed that it'd be outrageously expensive (earlier we'd looked into getting a ride on one of those bike-taxis, but it was going to be, like, $30 for, like, two blocks, so Mom passed), and for three I'm actually really allergic to horses. I tried to convince Mom it'd be fine, but in all honesty I probably would've been ridiculously covered in rash and wheezing hard within a block. So, we arrived along the lake-side road. 
     It was the first time I'd ever seen a great lake before (beyond, perhaps, a brief glimpse from an airplane). We eventually got to the pier, but guess what--the Ferris wheel and the awesome swing ride weren't open! Huzzah! That's right, weren't open. As in they were closed. As in that "huzzah" was sarcasm. I know it's hard to tell when I'm typing, probably. So we strolled onto it to check it out anyway. Going towards it we passed a neat little beach, and so we agreed to stop there on the way back. We bought some touristy things and took some touristy pictures on the pier. There was a little frog-hopper-style little kid's drop-tower type ride open (pictures later will help explain what this is) and so I convinced my mom to buy me a ticket for that, since I figured it'd be worthwhile to ride the only ride open. It really was a very little kid ride, though, and it went even slower than it looked from the ground, but the view was nice from the top. 

     So then we walked back and we stopped at the beach. The sand felt splendiforous on my bare feet that were plagued with exhaustion at that point, like a shifting, soft massage rolling gently across them. The water of the lake was icy but refreshing, and it felt kind of good to numb my feet a little. We took some pictures, of the beech and the city and the geese and seagulls, then we caught a bus back to the train station and thence a train back here where we're staying. 

     We hath been on a sojourn and an adventure on the other side of the violet mist today.