Cloud Gate

Meet the most incredible piece of public art I've ever had the pleasure of admiring. While its proper name is Cloud Gate, it's more often affectionately known as the silver bean. It's everything a piece of public sculpture should be - beautiful, thought-provoking, interesting, memorable.

Cloud Gate

From underneath

It sits in the middle of Millennium Park, Chicago, and it's constantly surrounded by mesmerised people. Weighing roughly one hundred tons, I think it is worth every penny of the twenty-three million dollars it cost to create. Amazing, right? It's no green cactus-thingy though...

Cycling and Culture in Chi-Town

Chicago is magnificent. The architecture is magnificent. Lake Michigan is magnificent. The Lakeshore Trail is magnificent. The museum campus and the museums are magnificent. The free Lincoln Park zoo is magnificent. The Christmas lights are magnificent. Are you getting the gist? I didn't even really want to go to Chicago - I knew nothing about it, couldn't really be bothered looking into it, and Daniel struggled to tell me what was actually there to see and do beyond a Jay-Z and Kanye West concert. It ended up being a magical few days, a highlight of the trip and easily the most beautiful city we visited.

The edge of Lake Michigan has not been industrialised, which makes the Chicago shoreline one of the most gorgeous in the country. We hired bicycles and rode some seven or eight miles along it, from Lincoln Park to the Museum Campus - an amazing ride despite the bitter cold and the locals laughing at our daggy bikes. It's also surprisingly hard to cycle while wearing a dozen layers of thick clothing.

Look Mum, No Eyes!

Skyline

No Feet

The museums themselves are world-class. The Campus is a fifty-seven acre park on the water, surrounding the Field Museum of Natural History (some of you may know this from the Ben Stiller Movie Night at the Museum), the Adler Planetarium and the Shedd Aquarium. You would need a week to explore the cavernous depths of these places properly - we were wrecked after a few hours. The most famous exhibit at the Field Museum is Sue, the largest, most complete and best preserved T-Rex skeleton in the world. Running in a 3-D theatre is a half-hour documentary about the discovery and recovery of Sue - it really was interesting. The most amazing creatures at the Shedd Aquarium were the majestic Beluga whales.

Chicago at dusk from the Museum Campus

The Return

It was twilight when we finally left, and the view back to the city was breathtaking. The photos really don't do it justice, they never do. We didn't ride home but jumped into a cab - it was too late, too cold and we had somewhere to be...

Things We Wish We'd Never Eaten #7: Deep-Dish and Dogs

Pizza and hot dogs are a staple in this country, and they come in all shapes and sizes. The most distinctive interpretations of these junk-food classics, though, are found in Chi-town.

Pizzeria Uno opened in 1943, and it's been going strong ever since. This particular restaurant claims to have originated the deep dish pizza, so iconic in Chicago. We got two individual 'pies' to share, one a barbecue chicken and the other a supreme.

Deep Dish Pizza

I'm not sure if deep dish pizza actually counts as pizza; it truly is more like a pie. The crust resembles shortbread or pastry, thick, solid and crumbly. It's quite heavy, really, and the texture just doesn't live up to what you expect of a pizza. The toppings are layered, some two inches thick. They're your standard pizza ingredients, but they don't cook as thoroughly and the proportional balance is different. It was an interesting experience, and not entirely unpleasant on the taste-buds, but we agreed it wasn't something we needed to try again. Dogs on the other hand...

Chicago Dogs are sometimes said to have been "dragged though the garden," and it's a fairly accurate description. On a Chicago Dog you will find all the ingredients you could imagine on a steamed poppy seed bun - sausage, onion, sweet pickle relish, mustard. You'll also find a lot of things you most likely wouldn't have imagined - crushed and quartered roma tomato, celery salt, pickled sport peppers (jalapeno-esque) and a pickle spear. Having you noticed the glaring omission? You will find no ketchup on a Chicago Dog, and it's presence immediately disqualifies anybody from having the Chi-style food experience.

Dog stand

A Chicago Dog

I ordered a plain hot dog with mustard and ... KETCHUP ... and the guy glared at me like I was a Yankees fan. Daniel went the full hog and said that, apart from being ridiculously hard to eat, it got his vote. He described it as a party in your mouth. This particular party, though, got advertised on Facebook and some unexpected guests turned up, but by the end you decided they really helped the mix of things. On the way home, however, he patted his belly and announced that the party was over and everybody wanted to leave... Nice.

The California Zephyr

Thus far we had travelled by plane, car, ferry, horse and bicycle. In the spirit of a true Grand Tour we took a train from San Francisco to Chicago. The route is known as the California Zephyr, and it's one of the most scenic in the country. It's also the longest - we were on board for fifty-five hours from 0900 Sunday to 1600 Tuesday. After considering this length of time in light of the fifty-odd hours it took us to get from Perth to Boston, we booked a 'roomette' in a sleeper car, the equivalent of a business class ticket on a plane.

Daniel and his beloved Poisian

Two large and comfortable chairs faced each other with a retractable table in between. At night, the chairs would slide flat to make a bed and a second pulled down from the roof. All in all it was very comfortable (at least for Daniel, who took the much roomier bottom bunk), and quieter and more scenic than a plane. Between books, the laptop and a cross-stitch kit I picked up in Monument Valley, boredom was not an issue, and that's to say nothing of the scenery. Over the three days we passed through the deserts of Arizona and Utah (near the La Sal Mountains where we'd been a couple of weeks previously), the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains.

The most bewildering sight of our journey was a deer, or at least a deer head sticking out above a frozen river. Behind it, leading from the bank, was the partly refrozen path it had taken up to that point. It seems the water was so cold the poor deer only made it halfway across. It'll have to wait until spring to get to the other side...



All our meals were included and taken in a communal dining car. Over some six or seven sittings we encountered some lovely people, and a number of geologists. Actually, we met three different geologists over three meals - it makes sense, I suppose, given the train route. It was nice to have some varied company - Daniel and I are getting quite sick of sitting down for dinner, looking at each other and asking "whats new?" Not much.