Category Archives: United States

It’s SO Hot Out…

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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

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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.

Destination: Brooklyn

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New York City. It’s one of the capitals of the world, a city teeming with sights to see, performances to take in, restaurants to savor. Of course, when we think of all the wonders of New York, we think of Manhattan. While there are certainly many years’ worth of things to see and do there, other boroughs have their own, less frenetic, charm. Since my sister lives in Brooklyn, I’ve spent a good portion of my two New York trips there, and I’m here to tell you it’s easy to make a whole visit out of Brooklyn alone. Here are some ideas:

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Prospect Park

Saturday was the first nice day in a long time, and we went for a walk in Prospect Park, which stretches along over twenty city blocks, topped by a giant statue in Grand Army Plaza. The whole park was full of kids and their families playing catch, flying kites, and riding scooters all over, and we strolled along past cyclists and joggers on our way to the farmer’s market. A perfect afternoon!

Cocoa Bar

I whiled away an hour or two at this Park Slope café, drinking a tasty hot chocolate and eating a divine piece of cake called Death by Chocolate. It involved cake, pudding, AND mousse, and no, I did not perish (but I didn’t finish it either). They have a garden backed by a colorful mural, which makes it even more appealing in warmer times.

Park Slope Food Coop

(No, I’m not sure why they don’t hyphenate.) One of the most established co-ops in the country, this place is highly organized. You can’t shop there unless you’re a member, you can only visit if you sign in and wear a visitor’s badge, and if you’re a member, you have to work at least one shift a month or find yourself no longer allowed to shop there because you aren’t contributing your part. The rules make sense for a small place that has over 14,000 members, but it is a bit daunting. Pro tip: don’t go at 5pm on a Sunday. It’s a little scarring. But! The food is cheap, and so much of it is local and organic, and it sure does beat giving your money to a giant conglomerate. Plus, just this week they were raffling off a classic Schwinn, so, y’know, hipster cred is always maintained. So find a friend who’s a member and head on in.

Brooklyn Bridge and Original Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory

Back when I visited during the summer, Emily took me to Brooklyn Heights, where we had delicious ice cream at the Original Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory while strolling along the pier right under this giant bridge that I hear is being sold for a really good price. (Aw, poor NYC, maybe we shouldn’t make Brooklyn Bridge jokes when their mayor is renaming other bridges nearby.)

Coney Island

Just take the F train all the way to the end of the line and ta da! You’re at the beach, complete with an old-timey carnival and boardwalk. When my flight was delayed on my summer visit, I spent a couple hours sunning in the sand, eating a hot dog, and peeking at the Ferris wheel at Coney Island. This place was a resort destination as early as the 1830s, back when it was still an island and landfills hadn’t connected it to the mainland. Nowadays it’s a bit run-down, but you can still buy an ice cream, a useless souvenir, and an amusement park ride ticket for under $20, so what else could you ask for?

Outpost

Outpost seems to be one of those places that can be a little bit of everything for everybody–café, bar, restaurant, gallery, performance spot. When I visited during Gay Pride Weekend in ’09, a queer party group called Banned threw a delightful fête here with cupcakes, dance music, and burlesque performers who stood on tabletops and set their tassels on fire. It was pretty exciting. Also, there is a charming garden in the back with cozy seating to share a beer or three with your friends.

Park Slope shops

This neighborhood has a well-deserved reputation for being full of yuppie parents steamrolling over the sidewalks with their giant strollers, but as long as you stay nimble and avoid getting run over, there are a lot of neat shops to see. Emily and I walked along 7th Ave and poked our heads in many independent stores, places built up by locals and supported by the same. I think after a few hours I’d find it all a bit precious, but until then, the many stationery, framing, book, jewelry, and boutique pet stores are a fun way to while away an afternoon.

Re/Dress

Emily found out about Re/Dress through a friend and knew it would becomeo an immediate favorite of mine. It’s a used and vintage store for women sizes 14 and up, and unlike most thrift stores, it’s huge. (Puns!) The staff is friendly and affirmative, the décor is zany and bright, and the clothes are affordable and good quality. Emily found me the perfect LBD there, and I stocked up on summer dresses in ’09 that get me compliments every time I wear them. Highly recommended if you’re in the size range and in the neighborhood (which I think is Brooklyn Heights?).

I know there’s much, much more to see, but next time I visit Brooklyn I’m sure I’ll have even more suggestions to bring back for y’all. In the meantime, enjoy!

http://www.brooklynicecreamfactory.com/

Smokin’!

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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:

my aunt gave me this bandana for hiking trips, but turns out it is also useful in those perilous "quiet night at home" situations

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

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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

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!