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.

Notre Dame @ Stanford

College football is one of America's foremost religions. In many ways it's bigger and better than the NFL, the professional league. It's certainly a more interesting institution. The only thing Americans love more than their country is their college football team. These loyalties are fiercely proud, often born and bred and life-long. A fair-weather fan is no fan at all. At Stanford Stadium, for the last Stanford game of the season, we saw babies in team jerseys and ninety-year-old men in Stanford caps. There were more than fifty thousand people in attendance.

Stanford Stadium

The weather is fair in Stanford at the moment. The team is ranked fourth in the country, and their quarterback is one of the best in the league. In fact, Andrew Luck was the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy (most outstanding player in collegiate football) both this year and last, and he is widely expected to be the number one draft pick for the next NFL season. Fans of poorly performing NFL teams have been running "Suck for Luck" campaigns, urging their teams to lose any remaining games so as to increase their chances of being allowed the first draft pick. This kid is twenty-two years old, the same age as my younger brother. He has the whole world at his feet. Watching him lead the final game of his college career, and take a knee to end it after they'd easily defeated Notre Dame, was enough to give anybody goosebumps.

Andrew Luck (12)

The majority of college football players, however, will not have the chance to play professionally. Some of them may barely take the field throughout college. For all of these players, college football is as big as anything in their lives is likely to get. How do you top playing in front of tens of thousands of people and being watched on television by millions, all to a soundtrack of brass bands and national anthems?

Sidelined

At the end of the game thousands rushed the pitch to farewell the seniors and celebrate both this battle and the war. We left through the Tailgating area, where people park their cars and RVs the morning of the game, and spend the day drinking and barbequing with friends and family in anticipation of the evening ahead. We caught the Cal Train back to San Francisco, an hour away, and fell asleep dreaming big dreams.

The Golden Gate Bridge

We didn't jump off, but as we walked across it I couldn't help but contemplate what it would be like to do so. Thousands have tried to commit suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, and only a handful have failed. The deck is roughly seventy-five meters above the water, and the fall takes around four seconds. Most die on impact from the trauma of their injuries, while others drown or succumb to hypothermia. Often their bodies are pulled underwater and simply swept out into the ocean, never to be recovered. Those who survive hit the water feet first at a slight angle, though they do not walk away unscathed. A plastic-covered stainless steel net will soon be constructed below the bridge as a suicide deterrent, but it may be delayed due to funding issues. Here's hoping it works.

The bridge is so beautiful, and we made it out there on a sunny but windy day. It gleams in the sunlight, and the colour is mesmerising against a blue sky. The air was chilly though, and halfway across I would have given anything for a beanie. I don't know what the wind speeds out there were, but it sure felt like it was blowing a gale.

I seem to have developed a strange predilection for spotting marine life, though Daniel never believes me. I told him I could see seals or sea lions in the waters below. They were just dark specks, really, but I managed to capture a few of them with the telephoto lens as proof.

There was obviously a feeding frenzy of some sort happening, because there were a few seals, lots of birds and even a couple of dolphins. The dolphins were easier to spot because their movements are more distinctive. The seals just sort of float around a lot, and they look uncannily like driftwood from seventy-five meters above.

Alcatraz

About the same size as our flat

San Fran from across the Bay

On the ferry

Cells

Released