Chicago!

No, I'm not referring to the musical, but the city! By the way, this is Mike using Melissa's Blogger log-in name. Here's the story. Last Saturday (May 31) Melissa flew back to Illinois from Idaho, and I drove up to Chicago to pick her up. Since her flight was scheduled to arrive at 2:00pm, we decided it would be fun to spend the afternoon and evening in Chicago, so we did.

The first thing we did was check out the Art Institute of Chicago ( http://www.artic.edu/aic/), something we've been talking about doing for a long time. Below are some of the major works of art we had the great privilege of seeing at the Art Institute. They are, from top to bottom, The Bedroom by Vincent Van Gogh, American Gothic by Grant Wood, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884 by Georges Seurat, Haystacks by Claude Monet, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, and Sky Above Clouds IV by Georgia O'Keefe








After our visit to the Art Institute, we starting walking around downtown Chicago. It was the perfect day for a walk downtown. It was sunny, the sky was blue, and the temperature was around the mid-to-high 70s. We wandered around Millennium Park and found this really cool amphitheater where the Chicago Gospel Music Festival was happening.


Also in Millennium Park was this really cool bean-shaped sculpture. In the photo at the top of the post, you can see how the sculpture reflects the Chicago skyline.

On our way to Maggiano's Little Italy, where we ate dinner, we passed by lots of interesting buildings and monuments. The most intriguing was the WGN building, which had random pieces of brick and stone stuck in the brick of the building. Included with the random chunks of building material were inscriptions about where those bricks and stones were (supposedly) from. Melissa and I became pretty doubtful about the authenticity of origins of the bricks and stones when we saw a piece that was supposed to be from the LDS Temple in Salt Lake City and another from the Taj Mahal. There were also stones that were supposedly from the Great Wall of China and the old city hall of Aachen, Germany, among many, many others. We didn't have our camera with us that day, so we don't have any pictures of the odd building. We'll have to take some pictures the next time we're in Chicago.

After dinner, we walked down to Navy Pier to check it out. The view of the city skyline from the lake front was spectacular. We estimated that we walked about 3 miles in downtown Chicago that day, and we only saw a small fraction of the city. It's a good thing we plan to take a few more trips to the big city in the coming months. We'll keep you posted on what we see.