It really is quite windy here

Location: Chicago
Mileage: 1,650
Music: The best Chicago artists in my mind – Sufjan Stevens and Wilco.

After our enjoyable stay at the Microtel we made our way the main campus of the University of Michigan. Though our guidebook had warned that it was an unfortunately unattractive campus, we both thought it was rather nice. The city of Ann Arbor itself is quite charming, and its reputation as the quintessential college town is well earned. The area surrounding the large university is full of pleasant cafes, bookstores, and cheap ethnic restaurants. Having become used to long searches for affordable but healthy vegetarian food, we were almost overwhelmed by our options. Eventually we chose a delicious Middle Eastern place called the Jerusalem Garden, where we both enjoyed fantastic falafel pitas and I got the best Turkish coffee that I have had in a very long time. While in Ann Arbor we also visited UMich’s free archaeology museum, which featured impressive exhibits of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts.

The University of Michigan

Having enjoyed our fill of neat college town, it was time to set off towards the big city, specifically, the big Windy City. En route to Chicago we stopped at a very pleasant town on Lake Michigan called St Josephs, which the billboards on I94 promised to have one of “America’s Top 10 Beaches.” Well, I don’t know about all that, but it was a very charming sort of place with a quaint little boardwalk and beach. After procuring dinner from a supermarket salad bar we took a walk on the beach, enjoying our first views of Lake Michigan. The plan was to eat dinner on the beach, but an incoming thunderstorm made this impossible. So instead we enjoyed our dinner from the comfort of Speedblazer as the storm poured down outside.

A storm rolling in from Lake Michigan at St. Josephs

Back on the road we enjoyed some more Pride and Prejudice, got a little lost necessitating paying the Chicago Skyway bridge toll three times, and then made it to our friend Ariana’s apartment.

Chicago has one of the nation's most impressive skylines.

Ariana's quirky apartment building

Ariana is a good friend of ours from William and Mary who is now entering her second year at University of Chicago’s law school. She just moved into a new studio apartment in the South Loop neighborhood of Chicago, only a 10 minute walk from the downtown area. Wilco fans, such as myself, may find it interesting to note that her charmingly bizarre apartment building was designed by the architect who designed the two towers on the cover of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. It’s been great to stay with Ariana, who has been the most gracioius of hosts and has provided us with free parking (a huge deal in Chicago, where parking garages lure customers in with inticing bargains such as “First 20 minutes of parking only $6!”) and advice learned from a year of living here. Unfortunately she’s Miss Hardworking Smartypants and has tons of work to do this weekend, so she’s been going to law firm interview training and writing law review since we got here. Luckily tomorrow she’ll be free so we can spend a day catching up with one of our favorite old friends.

Yesterday morning we got up early and hit the Chicago streets. It was one of our most walking intensive days to date, and we walked all the way from Ariana’s place, through downtown, to the trendy northern neighborhoods where we enjoyed a nice $2.99 lunch special. Next we wandered along Lake Michigan’s shores and randomly into Chicago’s free Lincoln Park Zoo. Though we weren't planning on visiting the zoo, we were both very happy that we stumbled upon it. We had a great time and spent most of the afternoon there.

Zoo lesson #1: Monkeys and apes are not the same. Monkeys have tails while apes, who are generally larger, do not.

Zoo lesson #2: Polar bears keep warm with two layers of fur coat and black skin which attracts the sun's warmth. They're also huge.

Giraffe's are both nature's funniest joke and coolest animal.

From the zoo we made our way south along Lake Michigan all the way to the Chicago Institute of Art, one of the world’s finest art museums, which Ariana had informed us is free on Friday’s from 5 to 9. The museum has a truly incredible collection, and we first rushed to the Impressionist collection, which is the world’s largest outside of Paris. We really enjoyed the exhibit, but by the time we were finished with it our feet were violently protesting being stood upon for nine hours without rest. So we rushed to a few more of the museum’s treasures, such as American Gothic, Hopper’s Nighthawks, and the Modern/Contemporary section before walking back to Ariana’s place. The three of us had a delicious (and healthy!) dinner of classic Chicago deep-dish pizza and ice cream. After the long, long day of walking and the heavy meal Alina and I were pretty much done for the day, so we retired for the evening, feeling a little guilty that we were going to sleep right in front of Ariana while she worked the night away interpreting immigration law. Now we’ve enjoyed a full morning of laziness before heading off to Chicago’s Natural History Museum.

Cheers,
Paul

Deep dish: one of the best pizza's I've ever had