We arrived late at night last Thursday and walked what seemed half a mile in the O’Hare airport to get to our hotel shuttle. We stayed at the Doubletree in Rosemont, a little “village” near O’Hare. The only thing that I could see there was a giant convention center surrounded by highways, hotels, and large office buildings. The hotel was pretty nice and we got a great deal, but the location was awful and it took me 45 minutes by subway to get into the city.
I spent the following day at the Art Institute of Chicago, which was amazing. I bought the audio tour and found it to very worthwhile. I paid special attention to the Asian section since there was a lot of Indian and Chinese art and artifacts from the time period I am studying for my next book.
If you are not interested in that I would definitely recommend the Thorne Miniature Rooms which were pretty cool. I went to see it in my last half hour at the museum and was sad that I didn’t go there sooner. Apparently this woman spent a lot of time, money, and effort making these little rooms that are supposed to be representative of houses from various time periods in English and American history. Basically they were beautiful dollhouses, but I couldn’t help but be in awe of her skill. I also walked a little bit around Millenium park, which is right next to the museum, but my feet were too tired to see much since I had spent all day standing around the museum looking at things. I also went to the Argo tea nearby. It’s basically a Starbucks with tea. They had a delicious Irish cream tea and Armenian mint tea. Mmmm. I hope it comes to Boston soon. I’ll never go to Starbucks again.
The rest of the trip was spent reading and writing. I went to the “Magnificent Mile” which seemed to basically be a giant road with shops like on 5th Ave in NYC only without the cool displays in the windows. There were lots of rich looking people there, too, as long as you didn’t accidentally go under the street like I did where you saw homeless people huddling instead, making you feel really weird about their being a second level to the city. It was weird. I saw homeless people and then walked up the stairs to see a giant bronze statue of a rich looking man with a woman in a fur coat strolling by next to it. Anyway, on a lighter note, they had turned the river green for St. Patrick’s day. I wondered whether it was bad for the environment. Oh well, It looked cool.
On the way back, our flight was cancelled so we got to spend and extra 4.5 hours at O’Hare. Joy of joys. We got home at 2 AM instead of 8:30.
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