Jamie Davis Writes

Last May I took a trip for the first time to see Chicago. I previously posted about the art museums, but I was looking back through my journal and having a grand time reflecting on the trip. We took the “L” everywhere, and I was amazed by how close the train came to people’s backyards. Once the train stopped, and if the windows would have opened, I would have been able to reach out and grab food off some guy’s grill (if I was rude like that).

The first afternoon we just meandered around and got our bearings. Wound up walking through Millenium Park and checking out our reflections in Cloud Gate (or what I had previously been calling The Bean). See below shot, it is a sort of Where’s Waldo version of Jamie and Bob in the reflection from Cloud Gate. Anish Kapoor’s sculpture was inspired by liquid mercury and is one of the largest in the world.

We also enjoyed watching the changing images on Crown Fountain (or what I had previously been calling Face Fountain). The images displayed are of 1,000 Chicago residents.

We even made it to Chinatown twice. Once for first dinner at 5:00 (where I ate an eggroll the size of my head and watched a lovely scene of two employees snapping a whole table full of fresh peas in the back of the restaurant between waiting on us), and then the following night we made it back for second dinner at 8:00. After first dinner, we found ourselves in some sort of general store where we procured a tea that has probably not been actually approved for sale (based on the reactions I got when I tried to take a picture of the shelves), along with some foot detox pads. Now, I can’t prove it. But all I know is that the day after we used those foot pads I had a terrible migraine in the middle of the Art Institute.

To be fair, I had worked myself up into a whirlwind tizzy of excitement over in the contemporary section. By the time we worked our way over to the Arms and Armor exhibit I was losing my vision. We sought refuge in the café and I wolfed down a cheese plate. We took a break and returned after dinner. The museum was open until 8:00 and there is something really magical about being in an art museum at night. We had a much better time after the crowds had thinned out.

I loved exploring on foot and taking in all of the Art Deco Architecture. We even went on a walking tour, but it was not Bob’s thing. At one point, he abandoned me to go to a McDonald’s and buy a coffee. Maybe we got on the wrong tour. He thought we were going to be learning about the massive steel skyscrapers. Come to think of it, so did I.

We took the water taxi from the Field Museum to Navy Pier. This was a great view of the city! We concluded that the best thing about Navy Pier was the fantastic hot dog we procured that came on a poppy seed bun and contained a pepper, tomato, onion, and a pickle spear. What a marvelous creation. Another thing we learned about ourselves was that we are New York pizza people. Sorry, Chicago. You just did it a little too much for our taste.

After our visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art we found ourselves wondering through The Drake.  We were adopted by the bellman, and taken up the elevator to see some show piece rooms. He said to us: “And this, this is the Princess Di Suite.  All of the windows look out to face Lake Michigan.  Can’t you just hear Christopher Walken’s Sailing?” It was truly a precious moment when the bellman made that comment. Let me tell you something else. Princess Di had quite a view from this room. Lake Michigan looks just like the ocean.

I saw a corpse of a rat under the “L” in Greek town.  He was just lying in the middle of the street, big as a Yorkie.

While strolling through the North River Galleries, a gallery girl kept asking me “Are you trying to build your collection?”

“No,” I answered. “I’m just educating myself.”

“So you can start a collection,” she insisted, nodding her head vigorously and winking at Bob.

I sighed and gave in to her. “Yeah alright, tell me about the Dali illustrations.”

As always, you can find our travels indexed inside our “Play” Journal, by Stealth Journals. A sample page is pictured below: