Chicago Impressions

(I wrote most of this in the airport on the way home. It took a nagging email from Jim to get me to post it. So, without further ado...)

The traffic sucks. And the drivers, as Jim observed, are just a bit crazy. I suspect that has everything to do with my first sentence – the traffic sucks, ergo the drivers get crazy.

It took 45 minutes to go from my hotel to the rental car return, and that was a 3 mile trip. (and as a quick aside – I normally spent too much time gripping about horrible customer service, but Enterprise provided uncommonly outstanding customer service so if you have to go to Chicago anytime in the near future, check them out.)

Downtown Chicago (well, the millennium park/miracle mile part) is very cool. The architecture is beautiful and the history quite colorful. I wish I’d had more time to explore it all.

Unfortunately, I was in a training class that totally baked my poor little brain and I didn’t do much else during my stay. Each night when I got back to the hotel the only thing I wanted was copious amounts of alcohol to kill the brain cells still twitching from over stimulation. The good news is I learned a lot. The bad news is, aside from the night I got out with Jim & Elizabeth, I saw very little of the windy city.

Meeting Jim and Elizabeth was my first blogger meet. And before Monday, I’d never even been to Elizabeth’s blog. You’ll find it over in my extra short blogroll now – check her out – she writes much better than I. And check out this post too – this is a short compendium of her “best of” just for moi.

Oh yeah – pictures… Here are some pictures from my trip downtown. They were taken at dusk and later and even then just with my 1 MP palm w/o a flash. All things considered, they’re not too bad…

First off - here is the "Bean"

OK, maybe it's not the bean. They're doing something to it so to be a wise ass I took a picture of the tent covering the "bean." Why does Chicago have a giant statute of a coffee bean anyway? Shouldn't that be in Seattle instead? (btw - Elizabeth has a better picture here.

This is the Aon Center (formally Amoco, formally Standard Oil) located just off Millenium Park. At one time it was the fourth tallest building in the world (I think).

This is the Smurfit-Stone Building. I have no idea what smurfs had to do with the name. (You can actually see a pretty good shot of it behind Elizabeth's bean picture linked above.) It was featured in the film Adventures In Babysitting.

Ok, now these pictures are of the "Spitting People." There are actually two of these large glass block buildings facing each other onto which images of regular Chicago residents are projected upon from the inside.

So why are they spitting? Well, there is a fountain located right where their mouths are and they shoot at each other. It's probably fun on a hot summer day...

And this is a little art treasure located on Daley Plaza. Look close, it should be pretty obvious that it's a Picasso.

And of course I also snapped a discrete picture of Jim and Elizabeth to prove that I really did see them. But I won't post that as to maintain Elizabeth’s anonymity... :-)