Visiting Chicago

Earlier this month we had to take our host daughter back to meet her teacher in Chicago to fly back to her home country with her group.  It’s always so incredibly hard to say goodbye.  It’s a post unto itself, and the transition back to family life without that extra person is always really difficult for me.  However, to celebrate our anniversary, which happened back in May, we decided that both Dr. Peds and I would fly to Chicago with our host daughter and make lemonade out of lemons as best as we could.

Because it was a special, multi-day trip, we stayed downtown in one of my favorite skyscrapers.  We flew in the day before we needed to say goodbye to our host daughter, and the day we departed we mostly spent time with her doing things that would distract her from the upcoming not-fun goodbye.  We packed our other days with fun sight seeing events and Dr. Peds and I had a lot of fun relaxing and spending time together.

We stayed in a hotel inside the Aqua skyscraper.  The outside of the building is covered in wavy concrete balconies all the way up to the 87th floor.  The first 18 floors are hotel rooms, and then the rest of the building is residential.  The design of the skyscraper is so very interesting.  I could look at it all day.  It changes in the light.  It changes when you stand in different places.  The concept of balconies connecting people into a community is really neat.

Inside the hotel is a super fancy lobby, a nice restaurant, an art gallery, and all sorts of fancy ballrooms and conference rooms.  On the roof of the third floor (which is larger than the floors above it) there is a garden with walking paths and comfortable chairs of all sorts to hang out, along with grills and picnic places.  There’s also an outdoor lap pool as big as the pool at our middle school.  We had so much fun swimming outside.  I loved floating on my back up and down the pool looking at all skyscrapers in the neighborhood.  We went swimming in the morning, afternoon and late at night, and it was different each time.  Everything about the hotel was great.  We loved our balcony, the luxurious shower, the sparkly floor . . . it was just a treat too stay there.

One of the most fun things about the trip was being downtown at night.  On our other trips to Chicago when I took kidlets, we stayed near the airport, and started taking the the train away from downtown as it grew close to dark.  This time we were right in the middle of things at night, and it was so fun to see all the buildings lit up, the fountains at night.  We enjoyed walking around and looking, and even more, we really had fun one night when we rented bicycles and rode through some of the big parks and on the bike path next to Lake Michigan. 

The image above is the view from our balcony at night. 

I have a favorite deep dish pizza place in Chicago that I love (Labriola’s).  The Banana and I discovered it by accident, actually, and it is preposterously delicious.  We went there to eat on our first day with our host daughter (because we needed an extra mouth to help eat the whole pizza).  Dr. Peds liked it too.  Then he decided that we needed to eat deep dish pizza at a different place each day to test which place was best.  In the end, Labriola’s won (by a landslide, in my opinion).  

Dr. Peds and I visited the International Museum of Surgical Science.  I figured that I’d better go with my husband, since all the kidlets were in a state of disbelief that I wanted to go to a surgical museum.  I learned a lot!  It was a medium sized museum, and took us about half a day to go through.  Some parts were less interesting to me, but some parts were absolutely fascinating.  I liked the art depicting surgeries, and it was very interesting to understand the history of medicine better.

We also went on two different architecture tours by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and visited their excellent small museum.  We peeked into the Chicago Cultural center in the old public library.  The rotundas and tile work was breathtaking.  We were planning on visiting the Museum of Science and Industry, but at the last minute decided to go with the Field Museum.  I think we probably would have enjoyed the Museum of Science and Industry more.  The field museum had interesting parts, but a lot of it was not so interesting to us personally.  (I did really enjoy the temporary exhibit of “Wildlife Photographers of the Year”).

By absolute chance there were some classical music concerts in Millennium Park, and we really enjoyed getting to be in the audience for Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.  The level of musicianship was fantastic.   However, all through the concert there was periodic loud buzzing. It moved from one side to the other of the audience, back and forth, toward the stage and away from it.  I kept looking up at the speakers above us that criscrossed the seating bowl.  One third of the way through the concert I thought to myself, Surely they will fix this technical problem.  How frustrating for the musicians on stage.  Two thirds of the way through the concert I thought to myself, They must really be having trouble getting these speakers to work right.  How sad.  It really distracts from the performance. By the end of the concert I was pretty frustrated about all the buzzing even though I had really enjoyed the music.  On the walk back to our hotel my husband said, “Didn’t you just love the sound of the cicadas?  It reminded me of being little in Nebraska at night.  I just loved listening to all of that buzzing.”

“What are you talking about?  Do you mean the speakers that buzzed all the time?  It was so frustrating that they couldn’t fix the speaker problem.”

“No!  Those were bugs!  Cicadas!”  And then I learned all about cicadas.  And I had a good giggle that probably those noisy bugs were nostalgic for most of the audience, a sign of summer.