July 1 - July 5
Monday - Day ThreeThe hotel in which we are staying is the Congress Plaza Hotel, right in downtown Chicago. We are opposite Grant Park and one block over from Lake Michigan. It is an old hotel, built in 1893, and full of nineteenth-century splendours a little worn down, like marble staircases (real marble) with balustrades painted thickly with white paint, but which I suspect are mahogany underneath, and vaulted ceilings and gilded scrollwork. It is now a two-star hotel that caters to budget travellers, but it is still beautiful, and the rooms are nice and big. Unlike the hotels we are used to in New York, where a room the size of the alcove where Garry keeps Khorana & his telephone is considered a luxury room (last year, when we stayed at the new Time hotel, the space between our king-sized bed and the walls all around was just enough to walk through), the rooms here are spacious, with two large windows and floor-length curtains. Two stars or not, we are very pleased. Last night we took what we thought would be a short walk from our hotel to a trendy Chinese restuarant, but learned our first lesson about Chicago: 530 S. Wabash St is NOT the same thing as 530 N. Wabash St. (We were near the first, but where we wanted to go was the second). That gave us our first walk around downtown. As we cross the bridge over the Chicago River we spot both the Chicago SunTimes building and the Chicago Tribune. Nico says: "Let's get a SunTimes. We can get tomorrow's news today." Philip retorts: "You can only get that if it's delivered to you by a cat." (For those deprived Pearson students who may have no idea what we are talking about, it's a reference to a TV show - Early Edition.) We ended up with a wonderful Nouvelle Chinese dinner (Chinese food served up a Nouvelle Cuisine way - very interesting). After dinner we walked back to the hotel via Michigan Avenue, one of the main roads. It was a very entertaining walk. An incredible jazz combo was jamming on a street corner. What we then thought were crowds of people were crossing Michigan Avenue as we neared our hotel to go to the Taste of Chicago - a food fair - which takes place in Grant Park (right opposite our hotel). Today we ourselves decide to see what this Taste of Chicago is all about. So we forego breakfast and head over to the park. We get there before the big lunch crush. The park is a veritable cornucopia of foods. Restaurants all over Chicago set up booths there and serve dishes for everyone and anyone to taste. The way it works is that you purchase strips of 50c. tickets, and each dish is 'sold' for a specified number of tickets. At each booth, moreover, you can get a 'taste' of something, generally for three tickets. This, Philip has determined, is a rip-off, because if you got as small a portion as the 'taste' portion for a dollar fifty in Nassau you would not get away with it when that portion was put up against the full meal. But the good thing about these 'tastes' is that you can sample a lot of food relatively inexpensively, and after doing so can find yourself rather full. So if it is a rip-off it is still a good arrangement - as long as you taste several different dishes. After eating, we explore some of the rest of Grant Park, and even though it's July, one understands why this place is called 'The Windy City'. As we get closer to the lake, Nico complains of being cold and we move back into the crowd, whose body heat makes it summer again. We spend a couple of hours at the Taste, and decide to return to the hotel to relax and sort out our dinner plans. We have decided to get as far away from the park as possible in the evening, as we expect that the place will fill up with people anticipating the holiday. Before dinner, we have some time to kill and we had eariler noticed an artsy cinema one block over from the hotel. It is showing, among other things, the new Woody Allen movie Small Time Crooks. We go, enjoy the movie and recommend it to anyone who likes Woody Allen. The restaurant we picked for dinner is a branch of a New York restaurant called the Park Avenue Cafe. It is on the other side of downtown, about a half-hour walk from the hotel, just off the Miracle Mile. Very nice, very upscale. Dinner is most pleasant. At around 10, when we are finished, we start to make our way back to the hotel. We assume that, as in most places, the fireworks would start either at the stroke of midnight, or on the actual day of Independence. The city, however, held its big fireworks display on the night before Independence in Grant Park between the hours of - you guessed it - 9 and 10 p.m. So as we head back towards Grant Park (and our hotel) over one million people (yes, we said 1,000,000 people - we got the figures from CNN) are heading towards us, away from the park! As Bahamians from Long Island would say: "No man seen a crowd like that!" Nico of course, being vertically challenged, couldn't fully appreciate the vast hordes of people. She just held on to the back of my pants or onto my hand as we jostled our way through the crowd. The fun parts came at each crossing, where a new wave of about the population of the Bahamas surged out of the park and up side streets towards the metra & the subways. We made it back to the hotel fine, but it was a very interesting experience. The crowd was very well behaved. There were thousands of police out as well, which probably helped. But we wondered what the Fourth of July would bring. |
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