Chicago, Illinois 3

Charles deals with a flat - take that Queen Elizabeth!

Another couch surfer in Phil's place arrived that night. A young man - whose name escapes me, let's call him Charles - was from England and was currently cycling across America. This wasn't really a vacation for Charles, more of a lifestyle. He had spent a long amount of time in Canada as an art tour guide, and had recently decided that he wanted to see some of the US. So he jumped on his bike and started riding. As far as I could tell Charles had very little clothing, and seemed to wear the same pair of cutoff jeans and football jersey every day. I'm guessing Charles had some money as he owned both an iPad and iPhone, but was frugal with his bike gear - his panniers were fashioned from old cheese containers.

A photograph of Chicago.

He was a nice enough guy though, talked in that very proper British accent that some of Australians find a little grinding (he in-turn was not fond of the Aussie accent). He talked about some of his experiences on his tour, where a significant amount of his time was spent camping in a cheap Wal-Mart tent. Only a few nights prior he slept in a back of a bar in Montana. But after some long days of riding across the rolling prairies of the mid-west, he had enough of the scenery and decided to catch a train to Chicago.

The next morning I decided to go and do a "Mob Tour" of Chicago. Since this was the city where Capone lived and worked in, I thought it seemed appropriate. Sebastian and Charles were not interested so they were to meet up with me afterwards. 

The bus tour only took a few hours but was fairly fun and informative. The tour guides talked like old mobsters and cracked old-style-dad jokes. But it was interesting to see the locations where some of the mob massacres occurred,  the location of the brothel that Capone worked at etc. The bus also ventured into South Chicago, where I got to see some of the poorer and more crime-ridden neighbourhoods from the safety of a tour bus. 

On the Mob tour.

A side note: Almost every guided event in the US starts the same:

• "Are you ready to have a good time?"
• "Yeah..."
• "I can't hear you, I said ARE YOU READY TO HAVE A GOOD TIME?!"
• "Yeah!"

This process was so universal you just started to expected it. There is something undeniably American about the whole thing.

Anyhow, I finished my tour (in which I got a free mob-pencil), and met up with Sebastian and Charles in downtown Chicago. Not before I tried out Chick-Fil-A for the first time, you know that homosexual hating fried-chicken place? Yeah it was pretty good, lots of different sauce flavours and the chicken comes with waffle fries. Nothing mind-blowing though.

The captured U-Boat.

Charles wanted to go see some art, so Sebastian and I went to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. We first went to go see the German U-Boat, which was captured by the Americans during World War II. The exhibit detailed the whole story behind the capture and how difficult it was for the Americans to capture it intact before the Germans could scuttle it. 

According to the Americans, once the German crew knew they had to abandon ship, they opened numerous hatches to order to sink it quickly. They also activated a number of timed explosives to destroy the submarine after they had abandoned ship. The German U-Boats contained a lot of technology and code-cracking data that would pose a massive threat to the Axis if it got into Allied hands, hence the extreme measures taken by the Germans. A great little part of the story is that there was supposed to be 15 self-destruct charges laid around the submarine, but the American explosive experts could only find 14! Anyway, it was a great exhibit.

Next we looked at the exhibit relating to space exploration. They had a great little piece on past and future rockets, where I noted that the Aries V was shown, a design which was part of a project which has recently been cancelled by the US government.

It's full of stars!

Unfortunately for Sebastian and I, we found out that the museum had a very early closing time of 4:30 PM. So after they starting turning the lights off, we headed out to see Chicago University. 

Me as a post-grad.

Luckily for us, we had caught the university in orientation week. So after wandering around taking photos of some of the stunning buildings on campus (Chicago University turned out to be the most picturesque University I saw in America, including Harvard), we managed to sneak into a few orientation events. 

It was pretty easy really, we just picked up a plate and moseyed on down to the buffet table. We ate "free" burgers, chicken, salad, vegetables, cookies and brownies. We also enjoyed sitting down and pretending to be students with a bunch of our "fellow" students, who probably had some pretty difficult internal questions like "how are you a freshman when you look like you are close to 30?". We almost tried to get free beer, but thought there may be a chance they'd check our student IDs, so decided to leave while we were still ahead - with a few brownies to go.

Sebastian and I get away with all the goods!

Sebastian had to leave for dinner with Phil, but it was my last night, so I wanted to stay and spend some more time in downtown. An interesting fact about Chicago: Downtown shuts down around about 7:30 PM. The bars stay open for happy hour and then it all goes dead. This is not to say that Chicago doesn't have a lively night life - some bars stay open until 5 AM - but these venues are spread out in different neighbourhoods. Luckily I was meeting up with Joel later that night in one such neighbourhood, so I decided to kill sometime and go see the Willis Tower.

The Willis Tower (formally known as the Sears Tower) is the tallest building in Chicago. It's like the Empire State in NYC; a sort of must-do tourist attraction. I don't think the view was a spectacular as the Hancock Tower I saw a few nights prior, but it did have the sky deck thing, which made for a pretty awesome photo.

Afterwards I chilled at a Dunkin Donuts (the only place I could find in Chicago with a power outlet to charge my phone) and then caught to train to go meet up with Joel. Joel had responded to my couch surfing request, but I had already accepted the offer from Phil, so instead I met up with him for a beer. Joel was a pretty interesting dude, originally from Spain, he worked as a Professor in Chicago. Gave me a lot of insights into Spain, including the economic shit-storm they have got themselves into!

Joel and I. The person who took this literately
had the need to take 8 photos. This is the best one. 

The next morning I packed my stuff up and head out of Chicago for Fort Wayne, Indiana. At some point I took a wrong turn and managed to get myself into the middle of downtown Chicago, something that I really didn't want to deal with. To make matters more interesting, I had to go through multiple underground sections which confused my GPS. But I got out in the end!