Pictures Cannot Do It Justice
So yesterday, Eric, Zach, Ben and I all went to downtown Chicago. It was “Corporate Day” at the Museum of Science and Industry, so everyone at Discover got a free ticket and able to bring in up to 5 family members or friends for free as well.
We left at 11:00AM that morning, and got back - at 9PM.
It was definately interesting trying to figure out where in the hell we were supposed to be and at what time in order to get on a certain train on a certain track at a certain station - WHEW.
Talk about confusing!
But when we finally did get to Chicago, we first went to the Museum of Science and Industry since they closed at 4PM on Saturday anyways.
Our first stop on the tour of the Museum of Science and Industry is their new exhibit, the U-505 submarine. This submarine is one from World War I, and was captured from the Germans by the United States on June 4th sometime during WWI.
Hey, you can’t expect me to remember everything about that sub - All I know is that they didn’t take it apart and bring it into the building, they actually dropped it in and built the building - AROUND the submarine! Cool.
Taking a little side trip through the geek tour is this model used in the Matrix movies - the Sentinel for all of you geeks. :-)
Its nerdtastic!
After the museum we decided to go and get something to eat - so we went downtown to a Thai restaurant called, very creatively, “My Thai”.
What I really like about Chicago is that there are really NO chain stores in the downtown area. You won’t see a Dominos, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, or anything of that sort, because simply, there aren’t any. It’s a nice change that’s for sure - watching people line up for a pizza place called “Rosati’s” or something to the like.
Anyways after we got out of that place, all of a sudden a swarm of police vehicles comes out of nowhere with a fire truck and two ambulances and goes roaring down one of the streets we just walked down. We backtrack a bit to see what was going on.
Let me tell you - the police are FAST. They had that whole road blocked off within MINUTES. When we got closer, we looked up and saw that a crane had fallen through a building!
Cool. It was actually down a sort of alleyway, so it really wasn’t that big of deal besides the fact that the side-top end of the building was all crushed in by a FALLEN CRANE. But no harm to the traffic - It was amazing the response time of the police though; they must have been there within minutes of it actually happening.
And then we went to Millennium Park - a brand new park right smack-dab in the middle of downtown Chicago.
This is actually a fountain of sorts, where there are two pillars about a pools-length apart, and each one has a face and it is placed so that they are facing each other.
Everyone once in awhile the face will open it’s mouth and water will come out. There were so many people there we could hardly move around - it was fun though!
This reflective object (everyone was calling it “The Bean”) was across a bridge in the second part of the Millennium Park. It was a really nice time of day so Zach was trying to take pictures of it trying to get the whole skyline. That was interesting.
So this is the inside of the bean. You can actually walk under it with about 1 billion other people around you and take pictures. I was really dizzy after looking up at that, but it was funny to look around at all of the tourists making their bodies contort in the reflective bean.
So after we went over the Bean, we picked up a train schedule and realized that the metro departed at 6:30PM (It was currently 7PM), and that there was a 2-hour break for the metro’s, and the next time they pulled through was at 8:30PM. So, we had some time.
We walked for a bit into the REALLY RICH part of Chicago - overlooking the lake and the skyline. This picture is actually taken before we reached the landing I am talking about with all of the colors.
As the sun set, the city seemed to light up - a purple and white apartment complex across the small river winding down into the city lighted up perfectly as the dusking sunlight fell across it. So beautiful the buildings - and very peaceful.
We actually went behind a construction site where they just finished up putting up yet another apartment complex and an underground parking garage. When you looked up, you saw that every apartment had a balcony big enough to hold a hottub.
I can’t believe such an isolated place existed in the heart of Chicago. As we looked across the lake I felt like I was standing alone on a beach staring across the ocean, not on a landing behind a construction site in the heart of Chicago looking across a lake.
Pictures cannot do it justice.