Western Springs, IL, April 27, 2012
Where in the World Wednesday
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Category Archives: Chicago
Embarrassing Myself for Your Entertainment
I talk so much about the travel I’ve done and the travel I plan to do that I think there’s an assumption I’m travel-savvy at all times. Not true! I make plenty of travel blunders, and sometimes even repeat the same mistakes I’ve vowed to learn from.
at least I got the station right
Take a couple weeks ago, for example: it was the week before Christmas and I was going down to the south side of Chicago for dinner with my aunts and uncles. My dad was in town and would pick me up from the commuter train station, and we’d meet up with everyone else for dinner. The next day, Dad and I would drive up to Michigan together for holiday festivities. A simple plan. Hard to get it wrong. And yet…
It was a combination of factors. I had the day off of work, so I simultaneously over- and under-planned. I planned to fit too much stuff into the day–see my out-of-town friend! pack! run errands! all after a generous lie-in!–and then under-planned the time each one of those would take. So by the time my friend and I hugged goodbye, I had nothing packed and was supposed to leave my apartment ten minutes prior. I rushed around my house, tossing into a suitcase more clothes than I’d need and jewelry I knew I’d never wear. (Poor planning leads to poor packing, y’all.)
Then out the door, dash to the el, get off at La Salle, up the escalator, to the ticket booth, turn around and face the several trains awaiting passengers. Dearest fellow travelers, here is where I made the fatal mistake. Each train berth is headed up by an electronic sign detailing the time the train would depart and the stations it would call at. I glanced at the signs, found the soonest departure time, and walked confidently to that train. I seated myself, tucked my suitcase on the floor next to me, and turned the music up on my headphones. Note that at no point did I check the sign to see where I was going.
Next thing I knew, the train was in motion and the conductor came around to collect tickets. I handed him mine and he said, “Where are you going?” “99th Street,” I replied. “We’re not!” he said cheerily. Wait, what?
Not exactly a train to nowhere, just not to where I wanted to go
Yup, I’d got on an express train. It skipped right past 99th Street, past all the stops I recognized, and went on to a town I’d never heard of–Midlothian. Sounded like a villain from the Bible. I could get off at Midlothian to turn back, but the next train back to Chicago wouldn’t be for another 45 minutes and it was pretty cold out. Not only that, I’d got on a quiet car, where cell phones are forbidden, so I couldn’t even call my dad without stumbling over my suitcase and walking to the vestibule between cars. I stayed in my seat and texted madly, my face hot with embarrassment and my eyes prickling with tears (which only frustrated me more–this wasn’t so bad that I needed to cry about it! good grief).
It all worked out, of course. Dad kindly offered to pick me up in this mythical Midlothian, and we weren’t even late for dinner. Everyone ragged on me a little, which is only fair, after which the whole affair faded as we dug into our food.
But you’d better believe I was a little shaken; if I can’t even navigate a train system I’m familiar with, in my hometown, how on earth am I going to make it in cities with schedules written in non-Roman script and train staff not speaking English? With a lot more planning and a lot less rushing about, that’s how.
So take heart. If you’re an inexperienced traveler, know that no one has it perfect, so there’s no reason for the possibility of making mistakes to hold you back from heading out the door. And if you’re a more experienced traveler and never make such elementary mistakes, well, you sound about as mythical as Midlothian.
It’s SO Hot Out…
How hot is it?
It’s so hot that the pigeons have given up. Rather than strut around their little poop-splattered kingdoms under the El tracks, or dive-bomb pedestrians in their petty turf wars, they’re lying down and calling it quits. I saw two pigeons today do this:
This is what defeat looks like.
Not even quite that. There was shade to be had, but it looked like they just couldn’t even make it that far, so they were sitting in direct sunlight, at noon, waiting for death. They each had the right wing out a little, as if it were sheltering something, but I saw nothing under the wing, just a patch of shade that did them no good. Poor little pigeons.
That’s right, it’s so hot out that even pigeons are inspiring sympathy.
Photo from here.
Sweet Home Chicago
On my way home from work today, I passed a middle-aged woman who perfectly embodied that Chicago stubbornness and optimism I love so well: She was dressed appropriately for the overcast, 45-degree day in pants, a jacket with the hood up, even gloves. And she was crossing the street licking an ice cream cone. Rock on, spring, rock on.
Spring in Chicago: tulips and parkas
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ferdsfotos/2468995357/.
I’m working on a longer piece, so I’m afraid that’s all for today, but be sure to come back on Thursday for a Mother’s Day post I’m pretty excited about.
Smokin’!
What is the most dangerous part of living in the city? Random attacks on the street? Gang violence? Daley’s privatization schemes? No, as terrifying as those all are, I am here to tell you that the closest I’ve come to death in my three years of living in Chicago was last Wednesday, when I nearly killed myself with the self-clean option on my oven.
I’d had a dinner party the previous Friday, and I guess some of that tasty meal must’ve spilled over into the oven during cooking, because when I was baking a pumpkin pie on Sunday, smoke rushed out of the oven vent and the smoke alarm went off. I opened some windows and set up a fan, and the alarm went quiet. The pie cooked for another hour, and the oven continued to smoke slightly. (The pie was unharmed, you’ll be glad to know.) Obviously this problem needed more attention, so Thursday I scrubbed the oven til it seemed pretty clean, and then I decided to use the self-clean button to finish it up. HORRIBLE MISTAKE. Almost as bad as deciding to watch The Proposal.
It started out okay. I went back to the living room and started watching The Office on Hulu and going through my mail. About ten minutes later, just when I was thinking, “Gee, this show is terribly mediocre lately,” I heard the piercing cry of my smoke alarm. I ran to the hall and saw my ENTIRE kitchen and dining room full of smoke. Like, all I could see was dirty white smoke rushing at my eyeballs with malicious intent. After clambering on a chair to grab the smoke alarm and pull out the battery (yes, thank you, I am aware of my impending doom, now please be quiet), I ran around the house opening windows and turning on fans. It was only as I was gasping for breath at the window in my bathroom that I realized, “I am inhaling huge amounts of smoke and will likely die of suffocation or lung collapse,” and wrapped a bandana around my face. I looked like this:
Smokey and the Bandit
I cowered in my bathroom, door shut and window open, freezing in the late December elements and figuring out a plan. I quickly ascertained the best plan of action was to not die, so I called up my friend Claire and begged to be sheltered from this fiery storm. Note that I did not turn off the self-clean function on the oven, oh no. It was scheduled to take 4 hours and 20 minutes and come hell or high water (or fire department), it would finish what it was scheduled to do. The smoke had cleared up so I could open my eyes without a burning sensation, and there wasn’t even any smoke coming from the oven anymore. Clearly it had burned through the mess I’d thought I’d mostly got rid of and had nothing left to destroy. I scurried down the stairs and out into the night, thinking that I sure would rather inhale the smoke promised by the scheduled clean time than the smoke currently circulating in my lungs.
After being fed and petted by the lovely Claire, I returned home a couple hours later to a stinky icebox. The oven was now clean, but my entire apartment stank of smoke and what smelled like burned plastic. It had got in my clothes, my furniture, my walls. Fearing I would need to fumigate the whole damn place, I left all the windows wide open for the night, but of course this is late November and it is decidedly Not Warm. I got ready for bed with the same grim determination seen in Arctic explorers: I will survive this night, I will survive this night. I piled on layers of socks and sweatshirts and my winter hat and added two blankets to the bed. With the sounds of city traffic blasting into my room on chilly currents of air, I shivered my way to sleep, mumbling to myself about the eternal hellfire awaiting self-cleaning ovens.
And that’s the story of how cleaning almost killed me. I will now return to my slovenly ways.
Tourist Traps That Don’t Suck
Ah, the tourist trap. A danger well-known to the savvy traveler, and one best avoided. It’s usually a cesspool of gaudy, overpriced trinkets, loud fellow tourists and shopkeepers, and somewhere in there, a pretty pitiful excuse for a landmark. Whether it’s a pit stop on a cross-country tour or a planned part of the itinerary, a tourist trap is, to those of us saving pennies and looking for more than plastic souvenirs, a hellish place.
Except when it’s not.
Hear me out, dearest fellow travelers! I’m certainly not saying that I’m planning my next vacation around a day at Wall Drug or an afternoon in Times Square, but the fact is that this is a pretty fantastic world we live in, and in even the most commercialized of places, there’s usually something of real value. Most of the time, this is because the people working the place have some interesting facts to share about it or a friendly perspective on the local culture. As we know, it’s the people who make the difference in where we go and what we see when we get there.
But sometimes it’s the place itself that’s worth seeing, honestly. My best example is Navy Pier. This is a giant pier originally built in 1916 to dock cargo boats and the like, as well as some pleasure boats. It has since grown into Chicago’s #1 tourist attraction, with a giant Ferris wheel (modeled after the first one ever, which debuted at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893), several theaters, restaurants, bars, and docking for many pleasure boats. It is generally considered by most Chicagoans to be a hideous place, only visited when clueless relatives are in town. It has an indoor arcade of shop after cheap shop, a nasty little fast food court, and low ceilings lit by glaring fluorescence. In the summer especially, the entire pier is overrun with screaming children careening all over, drunk parents yelling after them, and slouching teenagers forming impassable knots on the throughways. Everything costs three times what it does in the rest of the city, the lines go on for miles, and it’s not like it’s even a famous or historical site.
Navy Pier: Not So Bad! (photo via americanrail.com)
But! There’s a lot of good stuff going on at Navy Pier, underneath that hokey exterior. In the past few months alone, I’ve gone on a delightful brunch cruise, seen Taming of the Shrew at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and watched the acrobats of Cirque Shanghai tumble across the stage at sunset. Granted, these were all made considerably more enjoyable because they were free or nearly free (thank you, friends involved in theater). But the fact that they were there at all is impressive. Sure, the cruise had a cheesy DJ, but the brunch was tasty, and you can’t argue against a turn around the harbor on a bright summer day. The CST does some fantastic shows (even Shakespeare’s most blatantly misogynistic number was acted and costumed well), and the acrobatics of Cirque Shanghai are quite literally breathtaking. Each time I met up with friends to attend these events, I grumbled about getting all the way over there (it’s a two-bus destination) and dealing with the crowds, but once I got there, the crowds weren’t so bad, and the shows and rides were totally worth it.
There’s a lot of neat stuff packed onto that pier, and I’m now less likely to dismiss it as a whole. Some people might call that personal growth. I just call it application of advanced travel skills. You too can learn these skills of finding the fun and interesting wherever you go, and apply them to your own tourist traps.
So tell me, what tourist traps do you know of that don’t suck? Which ones have hidden gems and specific times to go? Which ones would you recommend (even with qualifications) to friends and visitors? Let everyone know in the comments!
First Day of Spring
Chicago surprises
Overheard on My Way to Choir Practice
Visitor 1: So how do you like Chicago?
Visitor 2: I love it! It’s like a nicer New York!
Visitor 1: I know!
Lights on the Water
Tonight I took the #11 bus north to Lincoln Park, to meet a friend for dinner. As we rumbled over the Franklin Street Bridge, I looked out the window and instantly I was in a strange new place. The river curved around behind me, the brand-new condos stretched out to my left, and to my right, Merchandise Mart loomed. It was 6:30 and already quite dark, and all the buildings glowed.
I take the same route home every night, and it all looks the same, so taking a new route or visiting a new place can be pretty shocking, in a good way. It makes the city new again. And especially when it’s dark and the nights are winding tighter and tighter around a cold winter, a new route reminds me of the sheer size of the city, the massive number of lives being lived. I feel closer to the people behind each one of those bright lights, closer in our anonymity.
Riding over the river always gets me — nothing clarifies and sets apart like a body of water, and of course it’s that same body of water that forms a connection between the two sides of the bridge, the body of water that is the reason for a city’s existence. The Chicago River is a dark mass that barely ripples through downtown, a river that flows the wrong way, a black surface reflecting thousands of bright lights and individual lives. And then just as I’m feeling welcomed to a new place of abstract shapes and the dark spaces between them, we’re on the other side of the bridge and caught in traffic. That moment of beauty and connection is gone as the buildings rise up around the bus and the glow of those lights is drowned out by the bus’s fluorescence. But the river remains, and there are always other routes, always other ways home.
Chicago River by night
Apologies, dearest fellow travelers, for a late and abbreviated post — I hope to flesh it out later.
Look for a guest post from S. next week, about living in Ecuador for a semester abroad.
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