As I mentioned before, Mariel and I were in Chicago this past weekend visiting friends. Despite my aversion to "what I did today" posts, I will be a hypocrite and do exactly that.

We arrived at Midway airport late Friday night and were picked up by my good buddy Nathaniel (or Nate as he is known as now) and his friend Mike. After a few minutes of road rage and general confusion on the part of Nathaniel, we made it to downtown Chicago to check into our hotel room, which was oddly about 40% bathroom. After dropping our stuff off in the room, we met up with Mariel's good buddy Tracy and had dinner at the Grand Lux Cafe, which is pretty much just a bizarro Cheesecake Factory. Our waiter was somewhat surly, and here's to hoping he didn't spit in our food...too much. After dinner, since Mariel and I were pretty beat from a strenuous day of sitting on our ass in an airplane, we called it a night.

The next day was a beautiful sunny day. We met up with Nathaniel and had lunch on the 95th floor of the Hancock tower, which I believe is the second tallest building in the city, behind of course, the Sears tower. The food was nothing special, but it was here that I started to realize a somewhat frightening fact: downtown Chicago is completely infested with spiders. I'm not talking nice happy Charlotte's web-type spiders, I'm talking big, fat, black, suck-out-your-eyeballs-type spiders. And I don't mean a mild gathering of spiders. This was a full on Kingdom of the Spiders-our-town-is-covered-with-webs infestation. It was even more amazing to me that even though we were on the order of 1000 feet in the air, the outer windows were filled to the brim with spiders. That is, they would be, if windows had brims.

After lunch, we met up again with Tracy and walked around on Michigan avenue, where they have, among other things, a Lego store. We went inside and I bought Nathaniel a belated birthday present, as well as three Lego minifigure keychains. We also saw the Chicago Tribune building, which includes stones "borrowed" from famous monuments around the world like the Great Wall, the Coliseum, and the Taj Mahal. After wandering around a bit, we ended up at the Chicago Jazz Festival. After enjoying some Cuban jazz, we went to the Chicago Art Institute. Unfortunately, we got there only about an hour before closing, so we quite literally had to speed through a lot of the exhibits. I did, however, get to see in person one of my favorite paintings, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

We had decided earlier in the day to have dinner at Frontera Grill, which is owned by Rick Bayless, a chef Mariel likes to watch on TV. When we got there, we were quite dismayed to hear that the wait would be two hours. We stuck with it, though, and just decided to have drinks and appetizers at another restaurant. Finally, our time came to be seated at Frontera. The food was good, but a bit overpriced. After dinner, we headed to Tracy's friend Gabe's apartment. On the walk there, I saw many more spiders, but there wasn't a protective pane of glass between us, so I was nervous. I would have taken a picture of them, but I was too afraid they would fall on my head and suck out my eyeballs. When we got to Gabe's apartment, we watched the fireworks at Navy Pier. I was super excited to see smiley face fireworks, which I hadn't seen since the first time I saw them in New York City. Before we all headed home, we made plans to go biking the next day, followed by an architectural boat tour. Surely the day's beautiful weather would continue throughout that weekend, right?

"HA."
-- God.

We awoke Sunday morning to cloudy skies and a light drizzle of rain. Hoping to wait out the rain, Mariel, Gabe, Tracy, and I had lunch at a restaurant called Bandera. I can't remember what I had, but I do remember that our waiter took away my mashed potatoes before I was done with them. As the hours passed, we resigned to the fact that we wouldn't be able to go biking, but we still held out hope for the boat tour. When we got to the ticket booth, we discovered that tickets were $25. After some consideration, we decided that a 90-minute boat tour in the rain wasn't worth our $25. Mariel had the idea that since we were in Chicago, we should go to the top of the Sears tower.

We took a cab there, and were met with surliness for our entire time there. The elevator was staffed by a surly woman who tried to discourage people from going up ("Are you sure you want to wait an hour and a half???") and while in line, you had to get your picture taken by a pair of surly Russian girls, who would mutter at each other in Russian if you didn't follow their instructions. We finally made it to the top after about an hour. It was neat, but to be honest, after 20 stories or so, everything is just sort of "high" to me, so it didn't seem any higher than the Hancock tower. After waiting in yet another line to go down the elevator, we called up Nathaniel and decided to check out his new place in Andersonville, which is in the northern part of Chicago. Due to a few subway mishaps, it took us quite a while to get there, but once we did, we met his cute cat (which, to my surprise, didn't trigger my asthma too much,) and just hung out for a while. We also saw the amazing pictures that he took while he was in Russia recently, and were sad about the fact that he pays about $300 less rent than us, but has a larger place.

We decided on real Chicago-style pizza for dinner, which is deceptively filling. I also noticed quite a few, um, portly people at the pizza place. It brought to mind the one funny line from the ill-fated sitcom Good Morning Miami: "What are you going to do in Chicago? Share a deep-dish with Sheila Chunkakowski?" ... okay, it's not that funny. No wonder they got cancelled. After stuffing ourselves with pizza, we watched a disturbing South Park episode, then headed to a bar.

The rest of the night was, shall we say, interesting. I shan't go into detail, but let's just say that it involved many many drinks (not on my part, of course,) sickness, a broken cell phone, a lot of laughing, a lot of yelling, and general mass confusion, not necessarily in that order. I shall never speak of it again. The one exciting part of the night was that I got to have my very first fresh White Castle hamburger. I'd like to say that it was a life-changing experience, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference from the frozen variety.

After a crazy Sunday night, we met up with Nathaniel and Mike Monday morning to have breakfast in our hotel before we needed to leave for the airport. The meal started with our waiter forgetting our toast and only went downhill from there. I think our waiter must have suffered from short term memory loss because most of our interactions with him went something like this:

Us: "Could we have some cream, please?"
Waiter: "Oh, sure! No problem!"
[Waiter disappears for a few minutes.]
Us: ...
[A few more minutes pass. We flag down the waiter again.]
Us: "Um, could we have some cream, please?"
Waiter: "Oh, sure! No problem!"

And so on. Fortunately, due to some quick action on Mike's part, we got our meal for free, so it all evened out. After this, Nathaniel and Mike drove us to the airport, and we said our goodbyes.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend and I was really glad that I got to see Nathaniel. I also really liked Chicago, and I recommend that any of you go visit. Just watch out for the spiders.

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