Chicago - My Kind of Town

Made it to Chicago Sunday. My flight was early. Go figure. Weirdest thing ever. Anyway, my friends picked me up at the airport and we did some touristy stuff. We went up in to the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) skydeck and had a look around.

This is that weird brown building in Chicago with the X's on it. I have no clue what it is. But you see it in pictures all the time. And the lake and other buildings. (Mikey told me it's the John Hancock building.)

Just another view of the lake and the downtown area.

Behind the tall apartment buildings is Soldier Field where they play football.

Just some weird triangle building I thought was very cool.

I loved this apartment building shaped like an S.

My feet, standing on glass 103 stories up. Eeep. It was really freaky to take that first step off the floor onto the glass. Your brain is screaming "No don't do it". Once I was out there it was fine.

The view from my hotel room window of the lake. Nice. I can also pretty much watch the TV's of the apartments to the left. I am that close. I should have brought my binoculars, I might have found something interesting.

Looking down there is this nice park near the hotel.

At night it looks even cooler. Beautiful city with all the lights. I imagine from the skydeck it looks amazing.

Part of the Macy's window display. My friends and I were all hyped to get to Macy's and see the "amazing Christmas displays". Umm. Yeah. It's the story of "Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus" but because we started at the wrong end it made no sense till we figured it out half way though. And beside the doll the background are all made out of paper. Interesting concept but to be honest I think my friend John's work puts this stuff to shame. It was average quality at best, I could probably have done some. So it certainly didn't blow me away and I didn't see very many people ooohing and awwwwing over it. Shame that.

Okay, the skeleton was pretty well done, but it's mostly just boxes and rectangles.

Tonight I discovered the all Hello Kitty all the time store. I did not enter. That much pink in one spot could have led to brain hemorrhage.

However I did go in the all Lego store and they had a lots of life sized (and beyond) sculptures in Lego. This was a full sized R2D2. Very cool.

And what's Star Wars without Darth Vader? He was HUGE. Probably at least 7.5 feet tall and all made out of Lego except his cape.

Apparently this giant sculpture has a name but it's referred to as "the bean". It's very cool, all polished metal and with the snow breaking up and sliding down it looked cool. That's very close to the hotel.

And that's about it. It's VERY cold here. Well, it seems cold. It was 10F this morning when I got up. I went shopping after training today and my legs were frozen. But not too much snow. Tomorrow is more training until lunch then I'm going to hit Macy's for a bit and maybe a couple of other shops and then head out to the airport which I hear might be a bitch of a ride during rush hour. I get home around 10:00 so it will be a long day.

I definitely want to come back though, but in summer. My daughter has been bugging me to come to Chicago so maybe this coming summer we'll see if we can swing it. Lots of fun stuff to do and my one friend is the nutritionist in a zoo so we can get a backstage tour which I would love. Hope everyone's having a great week.