Chicago II- This time it's personal.

Location: St. Louis
Milage: 1,986
Music: Joni Mitchell (when we're not reading Jane Austin)
Funnies quote: "Nobody likes a martyr, bitch-troll" - Written on the wall next to our table in Hyde Park's Medici's Restaurant.

On Saturday we took our time getting up and out of the apartment. Our first stop (at the bright and early time of noon) was the Field Museum of natural history. This was the only major Chicago museum that we were planning on visiting that we didn’t have some sort of free pass for provided by Ariana, so we were prepared to pay what would probably be a pretty steep admissions fee since the Field Museum is on of the finest natural history museums in the country. But we lucked out and happened to visit on a free day! The first thing to see in the museum is Sue, the world’s largest, best preserved, and most complete T-Rex skeleton. After gaping at the huge dino for a while we wandered around until we found ourselves at the Evolving Planet exhibit, both Alina’s and my favorite section of the museum. The exhibit was set up like a timeline, and we started back 4 billion years ago with the formation of the solar system and worked our way through the appearance of single-celled organisms, the first land organisms crawling out of the cambrian oceans, the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, six mass extinctions, and the evolution of modern man. We learned a lot of interesting things, such as the fact that we are still technically in an ice age. Who knew?! The exhibit had a huge hall of the dinosaurs including a full sized brontosaurus (for you Land Before Time enthusiasts that's "long neck"). They also had the skeleton of Lucy, the world's most famous hominid fossil, along with a step by step informational video on how to become a fossil yourself (step one: die). The exhibit ended on a sobering note, labeling the current epoch the sixth mass extinction, which is the first mass extinction to be caused by one species: humans.

Lucy and me - two of evolution's most important developments.

Mass extinction 6 -humans. Alina, sad at how much humans suck.

As we were finishing with the exhibit Ariana called us to say that she was done with her law review workshops and ready to do something that didn’t involve legal dossiers. So she joined us at the museum and we hung around there until it closed at 5, spending most of our remaining time in an exhibit on Tibet. We then made our way back to her apartment and Alina cooked Ariana and me a delicious pasta and vegetable dinner. The plan for the evening was to go to the Hancock building and have overpriced drinks in the bar on the 96th floor where we could get a great view of the city, but Alina wasn’t feeling well (too much deep dish?) and Ariana lost her ID, so we decided that a relaxing night in was on the agenda.

Alina thought it would be funny to pretend to be afraid of Sue. Ariana just thought Alina was funny.

The next day we made our way to the University of Chicago in the morning. We toured the attractive gothic campus for a while, as well as the law school campus where Ariana spends so much of her time, before making our way to one of the area’s best restaurants, Medici’s. We all had a delicious lunch, enjoyed the strange permanent marker graffiti covering all of the walls, and made our way out of Hyde Park and back up towards the center of the city. Ariana had procured free passes for the Alder Planetarium from the Chicago library, where you can check out free museum passes the same way you can check out books. We all enjoyed the planetarium, though we were a little tired and after a few hours, when Ariana fell asleep during the film on Apollo 8, we figured we were all planetariumed out. So we made our way back to her apartment and then went to the grocery store to get something that we could make for dinner. We had a really great dinner of tilapia marinated in apple cider and zucchini with onions and white wine. Having missed out on the views from atop the Hancock we decided to improvise by bringing our dinner and a couple of bottles of wine to the roof of Ariana’s apartment building. The view was fantastic and the food delicious – both Alina and I decided that dinner up there was the highlight of our visit to Chicago.

Chicago's skyline as seen from the Alder Planetarium

A fantastic dinner atop Ariana's apartment building.

The next morning we hung around Ariana’s apartment because she had to be at school but she was also waiting for the AT&T repair man, who in classic repair man style had promised to be there between 8 and 5. So we hung around until 1 when she was able to return and then we all enjoyed a delicious omelet lunch that Alina prepared. After that we had to get on the road to St. Louis. The drive was a bit arduous because we kept running into horrible torrential downpours and hail, but we made it to St. Louis in time for a late dinner with my second cousin Dee, her husband John, and their youngest son Turner. After the delicious meal, Dee, an extremely energetic and funny lady, insisted that we go to get ice cream at a local place called Ted Drewes, which she assured us was of equal importance to the arch for St. Louis denizens. Alina and I ate way too much ice cream, and when we returned to the house it was time for bed. Today we are about to set out on foot to explore St. Louis. More on that later!

Cheers,
Paul