Flowers!

It finally warmed up in Chicago today. Rather than the chilly days we've had all week, today we got 77 smokin' degrees Fahrenheit. What an amazing difference! Today's plan was breakfast at The Tempo, same as yesterday, but with smaller portions. Today I went with a simple order of French Toast:





I'm not sure what compels me to take pictures of my food, but no one has complained yet. Note: this is neither an invitation nor an inducement to do so.

I also seeminingly feel this odd compulsion to take pictures of our transportation. Today was a graduation, of sorts, in that we broke away from the Red Line and transferred to a Green Line train. It wasn't totally painless; we had no sooner gotten aboard the train to the Conservatory at Garfield Park when I induced a panic in myself by looking at the subway map and seeing that we were headed in the opposite direction from Garfield station. "Get off, get off!" I urged the Travel Director, much to the amusement of the native Chicagoans on the train. Once back on the platform, I realized my error but by then it was too late; five minutes in the penalty box waiting for the next train, muttering "better safe that sorry, better safe than sorry" to myself, ultimately unconvincingly. It turns out that the Garfield that I had seen on the map has nothing at all to do with Garfield Park. For a guy that held the presidency for all of 200 days, he sure is the namesake of a lot of stuff around here.



I'm sure it's normally a quick ride out to the conservatory but we suffered frequent delays for workers doing something or the other on the tracks. It wasn't much different from the orange barrel season which will be hitting full stride at home in just a few weeks.

The conservatory is only a short walk from the L train stop:



Amazingly, admission is free. Not nearly as amazingly, it is packed with school children as a consequence. We were in no hurry, though, so we just strolled around while I took pictures. I don't know what most of these plants and flowers are and I don't really care - they are just pretty. Here's a sample of some of my favorites:











































After the conservatory, I thought we might go to the Museum of Science and Industry. I'm becoming almost British in my interest in railroad routing. It looked like the Green Line to 51st to catch the #15 bus to the museum would work just fine. The maps don't really give any kind of indication of the nature of the area, though. The train did all it could and should do - it dutifully deposited us on 51st. Not to put too fine a line on it, but it just didn't look like the kind of neighborhood for a pair of obvious tourists to be standing around waiting for a bus. I mentally performed a discretion over value calculation and arrived at the conclusion that we should cross the street and get right back on a northbound train.

I have been wanting to get a seat in the very front of the train in order to get a driver's eye view, and was finally able to do so:



As usual with these kinds of things, I now want to drive an L train. Just once would do.

We had to change trains back to the Red Line in order to get back up to the hotel, but since we would be changing at The Loop we walked around a bit to find someplace for a late lunch. Just when it looked like the best we could do was cold sandwiches at a nice looking bakery (almost a Panera Bread kind of place), we happened across the Exchequer Restaurant & Pub. It had a dark, bar like ambiance, but there were a ton of great things on the menu.



I finally had to decide, so I went with the Wednesday Special chicken kebab and a 16oz draft of Rogue Yellow Snow Indian Pale Ale.



Both the food and the beer were fantastic, and at $8.50 and $5.00 respectively, one of the better deals we've had all week. And yes, having seen the tap handle, they meant 'Yellow Snow' in the sense you imagined.

It was better to have learned that after drinking it.

Lost & Found

I couldn't find my hat this morning. That's bad news when you're staying in a hotel room - there aren't that many places for it to be. It's here or it's lost, in essence. And it's not just any hat, it's my Vans Air Force hat that I won as a door prize at the formation flying clinic I went to a few years ago. If not sentimental value, at least a copious souvenir value. Now you may not know this, but Chicago is a very big city. I grant that we have only traversed a narrow sliver of it, but the search area is nonetheless quite staggering in size. Amelia Earhart's final resting place would be in a smaller area. I figured it to be hopeless.

But, there were a few places that we had gone yesterday that were strong possibilities and were near by, so it was worth a look. We could simply retrace our steps back through the strata of restaurants, starting with the pizza place. I really didn't to go back to the snobby place hat in hand, so to speak.

On the way to the pizza place, we stopped at the Tempo Cafe for breakfast. It's right down the block from the hotel, so anything it may have lacked in culinary quality it would make up for in convenience. And how can you screw up an egg, anyway? Nothing to worry about, as it turned out, since the food was just fine. Huge portions, though! We'd be set food wise for the bulk of the day.

There was no sign of the hat at the pizza joint, so there was no choice but to return to the Bistro of Shame. Which, unsurprisingly, was just as uncomfortable as on the previous visit. Ten minutes of obsequiously faux efforts at finding the hat, knowing full well that they had immediately incinerated it in fear of a flea infestation, I found myself yet again slinking away. Ugh, I hate that place.

That left Chinatown as the last place to look, but that would have to wait until later in the day. We were on our way to the Navy Pier on the recommendation of a fellow subway rider. I figured it would be a touristy thing and not all that interesting, but it would be a chance to visit the lake shore. Correct on both counts. Still, it's always nice to see large bodies of water when we get away from landlocked Central Ohio.

From the lake shore you can get a rare unobstructed view of the city scape:





Chicago has kept an eighteen mile stretch of the lake shore unobstructed to allow residents an area for a bike/pedestrian path (it's a shame they couldn't keep the terrific airport they had too) and there were a few people braving the cold to get some exercise:





It was either exercise, or running/biking was a necessity for personal survival. This guy apparently wasn't fast enough:



If you can ignore the various carcasses, it's a nice little beach:



If I wasn't afraid I'd end up like that seagull, I'd come back in the middle of the night and steal this sign. The irony of hanging it in my house might be worth the risk:



At last, the pier:



It's mostly a mall, but there's a Children's Museum (mummified remains of famous children?? Not sure!) and a little conservatory. We skipped the mall, not having any real interest in children, museum-worthy or not, but made a pass through the conservatory:





Ok, this one is just water, but it's noteworthy in its cohesion into a glass-like stream:



This is what happens when your name falls into the public domain:



I'm sure they had to pay a lot more to buy the right to use the fictional Bubba Gump name for the little seafood restaurant.

This guy asked me if I had seen his brother lately. I didn't know how to break the news to him that I had, in fact. I just told him "he's sunning on the beach."



The end of the pier!



Having reached the end of the pier, we were able to cross "Go to the end of Navy Pier" off of the list of compulsory Chicago tourist items and get on with the search for my hat. Rather than walk the five or six blocks to the subway station for our ride down to Chinatown, we jumped on the number 29 bus that was sitting right there on the pier, ready to go. As I looked over the CTA map, I saw that not only did the bus go to the Red Line subway station we needed, but also went all the way to Chinatown. Why mess with getting off of the bus and onto the train when they're both going to the same place, right?

Well, because the bus takes an hour to get there. We found that out the hard way.

The other reason is that you (and by 'you' I mean 'me') might go the wrong way at the Cermak Rd. bus stop and end up wandering around lost in a distinctly non-touristy part of Chicago. And even then, it's about pictures! There must always be pictures!



I'm trying to figure out the best way to crop this one. Option #2:



We eventually found Chinatown (the Travel Director asked for directions - I'd still be wandering around down there), but no hat. That was the last hope - it's gone for good.

We for sure took the train back up to downtown, you betcha! No more buses!





I've learned how to read the map well enough that we're going to try making a transfer to another line tomorrow. The Green Line will take us out to the conservatory at Garfield Park.



The huge breakfast had gotten us this far through the day, but it was definitely getting to be time to eat. I've been trying to find an opportunity to eat at The Soup Box, a place recommended by a Chicago resident. This was our big chance! It's one of those places built into a quaint, old residence:



Soup upstairs, tavern downstairs. You just can't beat the convenience of living in the city!

You're greeted by a cheerful wall mural on the way in:



There are twelve soups everyday, but the selection varies:



I sampled the Spicy Masala Tomato Lentil, Rosemary Chicken Dumpling, and the Potato & Bacon, but ultimately decided on the Lobster Bisque. Very, very good!

And, after days of searching, I found it! No, not my hat - I found mustard!



Having had quite enough walking for the day, we repaired to our lodging for a few hours of reading and relaxing. There were still a couple more must-do items on my agenda, though, one of which was to go to a martini bar. I had noticed a small place called Tilly's Jilly's (the Travel Director was aghast that I didn't remember that since it was emblazoned in sequins on our waitress's chest. I was equally aghast that the Travel Director thought for one instant that I had taken note of anything regarding our waitress's chest) Piano Bar while out on my morning constitutional, so we strolled up there for a couple of drinks. As luck would have it, they also had a food menu that included the infamous Italian Beef sandwich. That was number two on the to-do list. I'd say that it offered an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone but, well, I'm still thinking about that poor seagull. It would be tacky and insensitive, no?

Still, I ordered the Italian Beef and I loved it! It was so authentically Italian that they had to shave the beef before serving it! Not funny? Yeah, the waitress didn't think so either. Hey, they can't all be gems! Perhaps it would work better with Greek gyros...

Tilly's Jilly's was originally opened in New York by Frank Sinatra and his bodyguard Jilly Rizzo when Frank retired from the Rat Pack scene. There are a few of them now, and the one we were at has been there for fifteen years. Or something like that - for some reason (probably having to do with the quality of the martinis) my memory for the exact details is a bit fuzzy. I do remember the ambiance, though. Hard wood floors, red painted walls, and wall-to-wall black & white photos of Sinatra and his contemporaries.

I don't remember there being a piano, though. But they do have a song.

From Jilly's web site:

Located in the heart of Chicago's nightlife district, this Rush Street landmark is one of Chicago's original spots for the rich, famous and flashy. The Piano Bar is among the few places to offer live entertainment without a cover charge or drink minimum.

Well, at $12 per martini...

Another day in Chi-town (Cont.)

After leaving the most oppressive public library since the Lubyanka Kremlin-Approved Book of the Month Club, we jumped back on the Red Line to continue our trek down to Chinatown. There wasn't much further to go, but it was far enough that we were able to experience first hand the metamorphosis of our mechanical pupa as it emerged from the protective cocoon of the subway tunnel in order to spread its new wings and fly above the busy roads. Oddly enough, though, our conveyance still bore a much stronger similarity to a caterpillar than it did to a butterfly. Still no wings, alas, which really buggers up what I had hoped would be a clever metaphor. In any event, all I'm saying is that the subway turned into an "el" train. Pretty cool!

It's a shame that the metaphor didn't work out. You can't win them all, I guess. I'll just have to settle for having compared the Chicago Public Library to the KGB headquarters (and prison) made famous in novels about the Cold War. The CPL probably doesn't even keep those books in the Popular Library.

It was only a few stations from the library down to Chinatown. If the name of the station (aptly: Chinatown) wasn't enough to convince you that you had embarked at the right place, the view from the train platform would have:



When I was here last time, we arrived from a different direction since we had come by water taxi. We could have done that again, but the subways are more convenient and much warmer. From the direction we came from last time we ended up right where we needed to be, which was at the head of restaurant row. We would want to end up there again today eventually, but our first order of business was to go through the gate into "authentic" Chinatown. We were on a mission, you see.



A mission? Well, the thing is, you can get fairly decent egg rolls at the grocery stores in Columbus, but you can't get the sinus-clearing super-hot mega-mustard that the restaurants bring out with their egg rolls. There are bottled mustard products that purport to be hot Chinese mustard, but we have tried them all and none were capable of causing even the slightest sweat. In my opinion, if a mustard doesn't singe the back of you eyeballs, it's too weak. The plan was to go deep into authentic Chinatown and find a grocery store that would have the mustard powder that we needed.

You can't get into the heart of Chinatown without passing a few gift shops, and being tourists and all...



Hmmmm. Probably not our style.

Well, long story short, we tried three grocery stores and could not find any mustard. We saw dried squid, octopus, and sea cucumber. There were cans and bottles of sauces and vegetables of all forms. There was fresh (and fragrant) fish, and there was meat. There was even a tray of chicken fingers, albeit in a very strictly literal sense. More accurately, I think they'd be called chicken feet. Those wouldn't sell well at McDonald's, I'll bet.

But no mustard.

Having failed on our initial quest, I sought to come up with a Plan B. Ah-ha! We would find our way over to restaurant row, go to the restaurant that I went to last time I was here, and ask the waitress to write us a note that we could hand to a grocer to have him find our mustard for us. It was an intricate plan, a plan that would require us to order food that would come with mustard so we would have an example of what we trying to find. Not that that was much of a sacrifice - we sure do like our crab rangoon!

We waited until just the right moment: obviously having sampled the rangoon with a little of the provided mustard, the waitress seemingly caught up on her tables and with a moment to spare...

"Could you do us a favor? We're trying to find where to buy this kind of mustard. We've been to three Chinese grocery stores and the closest thing they had was a tube of Wasabi."

"Oh," she replied, "we buy that mustard at Costco."

[stunned silence]

Well, I'm glad she didn't write something down for me to take back to the grocery store, only to have "Go to Costco" read to me by an irritated grocer!

It wasn't an entire waste, though. I really like the food at the Lao Shanghai. Hey, I'm practically a regular there! I was sitting in the same chair at the same table as the first time I had been there. I took a little different tack on my food selection, though, opting for the Salt & Pepper Scallops which were a bit more spicy than anything I would have wanted when I was up there with PapaGolf. Those hot, bumpy afternoon flights can be brutal if you aren't careful with what you eat.



The Travel Director selected a very nice Sesame Beef. It was even better after being spiced up a bit with chili oil:



From Chinatown we rode the subway all the way back up to the Magnificent Mile to do a little shopping before returning to the hotel for an afternoon rest. That gave me a little time to poke around on the internet to decide on a dinner destination. We're trying to strike a balance between "easy to walk to," "more interesting than a franchise," and "not too snobby, but not too seedy." That's not awfully easy to do when working with nothing more than internet maps and reviews, but I thought I had come up with just the thing right around the block from out hotel.

Here's what I was able to find out about the place:

"The room is simply beautiful, and casual enough to fit in with jeans and a nice shirt with people who were in suits and ties."

"I had the pleasure of experiencing Balsan last night with two of my friends. The staff, food and service were great! Recommendations from the chef were perfect and the food was excellent! And it won't break your wallet... It was a great experience and I will be coming back with family and friends."

"This casual breakfast, lunch and dinner spot on the third floor of the Elysian Hotel sports an antique European look, with a marble-topped bar, antique mirrors and etched glass."

The Bing map had a little pop-up that said it was best described as a pizza place. I was visualizing something like a cross between Pizza Hut and Max & Ermas.

I should have known something was wrong when we walked into a courtyard that looked like something you'd find impressive even at Beverly Hills standards. We were ushered in by a doorman who passed us off to another finely coiffed fellow whose sole purpose was apparently to push the elevator button for us. I think we could have handled it ourselves, actually, since the only choices were Lobby, Bar, Restaurant, Spa, and God. There was another clue that we should immediately reverse course in there somewhere, but I missed it.

We were seated in a nice, quiet, dark corner which suited me just fine, although I suspect it is normally reserved for jeans-wearing rubes from small towns in Ohio. Best to keep them out of sight! It was definitely a gorgeous room, but without any sleds, skis, milk jugs, washboards, Budweiser-emblazoned Nascar car hoods, or eclectic decorative junk of any kind, I started to really think we were in the wrong place.

The menu removed all doubt.

The only word on the entire thing that I recognized was 'prosciutto', and only that because I've seen it at Sam's Club. I needed to buy us some time to decide what we were going to do, so I tried to order a beer. Naturally, there was no Miller Genuine Draft or Bud Light to be seen on the list. Everything was an import from some far-flung place. Except one: an Ohio import! From Cleveland!! That would do, although it still felt a little odd to be ordering an Edmund Fitzgerald, a beer named after a ship that sunk in Lake Superior. Ominous, that, but appropriate. My spirits were pretty much headed the same way.

While the waitress was off getting my beer for me, I asked the Travel Director what she wanted to do. She was every bit as lost in the menu as I was. I came up with an idea: perhaps we could adopt the approach we had taken with the subway information lady and just plead our ignorance, sip our way through a beer, and beat an ignominious retreat. Honesty have once again proven to be the best policy and all that.

The waitress? She was having none of that! I explained that we were just plain, simple folk from a small town in Oh-hi-yah and that we were completely befuddled by the menu and would just be shuffling along once we had finished our drinks. Was she down with that plan?

No. No she was not. She was going to explain the menu to us.

Now here's the thing: no amount of explanation is going to make head cheese more appealing.



In fact, quite the opposite is true. The more you learn about it, the worse it sounds! Frankly, I didn't know that people actually eat those parts of the animal; I thought those were the bits that went into store-brand dog food and ballpark hot dogs.

Look, I did my part. I tried to meet her halfway. I even asked if they had a children's menu. They did, but the tone with which she answered my query was quite enough to kill that line of questioning. There was nothing to it: bring us the check, please.

As she handed us the check, she felt compelled to quite directly tell us that an 18% gratuity had been added on our behalf. I hate it when they do that. I am perfectly aware that we had occupied what should have been a far more lucrative table for her, and I had intended to tip accordingly. It would have been well in excess of 18%. The temptation was to just pay her what she asked and leave. I suspect that's what the Travel Director would have agreed to. But I couldn't let the snobs get the better of me; I slipped another fiver on the table as we were leaving.

That'll show her!

Having made our escape, we still had a problem: we hadn't been fed. As we were walking back to the hotel completely without a plan, we saw a pizza place just across the street called Pizano's Pizza. Possessing the awesome advantage of having nothing more to lose, we walked in and gave it a try.

It was fantastic! Great service, yummy pizza, and a friendly atmosphere. Exactly the place we were looking for in the first place. A perfect bookend to our breakfast fiasco.

We shared a salad because the owner warned us that a pizza could take half an hour or so, and I had a Blue Moon to keep me company while we waited. After we had eaten and were getting ready to go, I noticed that the waitress hadn't gotten the salad on the check. I called her over and pointed it out to her and she went to make the correction. When she came back, she sincerely thanked me for my "great honesty."

That, if nothing else, pulled our evening up from a travesty to a stellar, memorable success.

Thank you, Mr. Malnati!

Another day in Chi-town

Having pretty much done all of the local exploration we could stand, we decided to get a little more adventurous today and see if we couldn't learn how to do something that is second nature to city dwellers all over the world: ride public transportation. Where we live, it isn't all that unusual to get in the car and drive to the end of the driveway to retrieve the mail and newspaper. Well, I guess it's a little unusual, but not completely out of the question. In big cities, it seems that you don't really need or want a car since the public transit system is so ubiquitous and far more cost efficient.

The weather out the window looked surprisingly inviting, but the view of the woman across the street that seemed oblivious to the fact that she was standing naked in front of her window? Not so much, truth be told. Why is it always the ones you don't want to see naked....

Looks can be deceiving though, and I'm not referring to Ms. Twin Peaks 2010. No, I am alluding to the nice looking weather. It was still far colder than I had planned for when packing. Still, as I remembered it we only had a short, one block walk to the place we had selected for breakfast. Something was wrong, though. Once we got there, the place looked different than we remembered. It took a frigid 15 minutes of walking around looking for the place we thought we were looking for to decide that it didn't really matter - we'd just go back to the first place. Which, once we went in, turned out to be the very place we were looking for after all. It was to be that kind of day, as it eventually became abundantly clear.

The public transportation we chose to cut our teeth on was the subway, although in Chicago the subway has a way of blossoming up from under the ground and floating over the roads, at which point it becomes an "el train." Not in the Spanish sense, as in El Toro or El Diablo, of course, but as an abbreviation for "elevated train." As with flying, it helps to have a goal in mind so we decided we'd head south down to "the loop" to make a stop at Macy's for some required cosmetic supplies for the Travel Director, then press on to Chinatown for lunch.

The Chicago St. station is only a couple of blocks from the hotel, according to the map I had picked up at the airport, so the plan was to board there and ride down to the Washington St. station which, again according to the map, was very close to the Macy's store. We found the subway station easily enough, but soon found ourselves perplexed with the task of buying a day pass. Fortunately, the Travel Director is a female and thus not as predisposed against asking for assistance as her companion is. She went to the information booth and quite plainly described our problem as being from out of town and unfamiliar with the process for getting a day pass from the automated kiosk, honesty being a well recognized policy of the best sort.

"Well, you can't," she said. "You have to go to Walgreens, or CVS, or..." and proceeded to go through a lengthy list of other retail establishments that all had one glaring thing in common, which was a complete and total disaffiliation with anything having to do with public transit. It would be like Walgreens telling you that you had to a subway station to buy aspirin.

"But you can buy a three day pass from the machine. Are you going to ride the buses or the trains?"

Now, I don't know why I found that such a confusing question other than that I had once tried to figure out how to take the train from the Gary, Indiana airport up to Chicago and had for some reason got it stuck in my head that those trains were somehow different than the subway trains.

"Well," I replied, "we're going to ride the subway."

"Those are the trains, sir."

What was truly amazing was there was not one iota of disdain or disbelief in her tone. We have been truly amazed at how polite and helpful the people are here. I don't know why that surprises us other than we probably have some preconceived stereotypical notions about big city folk. They may also have some preconceived notions regarding us small town hicks too, the difference being, of course, that I am going out of my way to prove them correct.

Anyway, it makes perfect sense to be able to buy a three day pass from the machine but not a one day pass, right? No? I didn't think so either. I just hope we can find someplace to go for the next couple of days, because we now have two more days of fully paid up travel to use.

Having determined that we were in fact going to ride the trains (for three days), she showed us how to use the machine to buy the passes and how to put the passes into the automated gates to let us down to the tracks. She showed us which set of stairs to use so that we would be heading south instead of north. She even explained that the station I had been intending to debark at was closed and no longer in service, and provided us with an updated route map to replace the obsolete map that they are still dispensing at Midway Airport.

Finally, we were on the train platform waiting for the next train to pull in.



It didn't take long at all for the next train to arrive:



We popped up on State St. and started to walk back to the north. I stop often on walks like this to snap pictures:







They must have just changed the marquee on the Chicago Theatre because these letters were piled up on the sidewalk. Now, you have to know that I am in inveterate meddler when I run across things like this. I've long since lost count of the times I have left messages on peoples refrigerators when I've found an unattended collection of those magnetic Fisher-Price letters sitting there just waiting for someone like me to rearrange. Can you imagine the temptation??



I think the only thing that stopped me was the total lack of vowels. Except for the 'Y', of course, but that's only a "sometimes" vowel and doesn't really count.

I think the Chicago Theatre must have at one time been the tallest thing around. The huge painting on the side of the building must have been visible from the road, but is now blocked by its much taller neighbors:



And I thought it was hard to figure out the subway - you'd need a map to find your way down those fire escapes!

I found myself wondering what strange combination of obsession pitted against recalcitrant property owners resulted in this very, very narrow building:



Long past the time when we were cold and wanted to get back on the train, I insisted on walking south far enough to see what this pretentious yet ominous looking building was:



It's a Chicago Public Library. We decided, what with it being "public" and all, that we'd go in and take a look. It turns out that the vast majority of the floor space is taken up with unpopular stuff. The popular stuff is relegated to this relatively small area:



The walls were adorned with all kinds of lofty quotes trumpeting the value of reading, and by extension, public libraries. This one kind of stood out:



After taking that picture, I was approached by a library employee who informed me that permission was required to take pictures in the "public" library. I told her that I'd try to contain my unsocial urges, but truthfully I was somewhat taken aback. You can't take pictures in a public library?? Why the hell not?? Are they afraid someone will find out that they have books in there??

Our taste for sampling the library had pretty much been ruined by that so we decided to leave. Which would have been easy to do, had we not been stopped at the door to have the Travel Director's purse searched. And they wonder why people don't read anymore. Unbelievable.

[To be continued]