9:24 CDT
Last night we strolled down to Navy Pier on the shore of Lake Michigan. We intended to sit down and get a civilised meal, but Pizzeria Uno, alleged birthplace of the Chicago style pizza, had big queues, and before we knew it we were in the Navy Pier food court ordering steak burritos and nachos with cheese.
I now believe I understand the joke:
Q: "When is cheese not cheese?"
A: "When it's nacho cheese".
The burritos were very tasty.
Carrying our luggage to the hotel, we never thought to look up. Now that we're less laden, there's skyline to see:
Navy pier provided us with a timely reminder of just how far we were from home:
.... and from the Ferris Wheel on the pier, there's another spectacular view:
5:40PM
We're back in the hotel nursing tired feet. Downtown Chicago is so compact that we've not used our bus passes at all.As you've probably guessed by the way I've got the last couple of updates onto the server, the modem works fine on the hotel room phone socket -- but on our quest for a battery charger (we needed one that uses US power sockets), we stumbled upon a gadget which sits between your modem and any phone socket, incuding the weird digital hotel lines we're bound to find, searches out the dial tone and gives the modem what it wants. $10, and an IBM product no less! It's also a power surge protector. It appears unclean power supplies are a bigger problem in the US than back home, because shop shelves are bursting with surge protectors. Anyway, enough of that, and on to the proper tourist stuff.
We intended to go up the Sears tower to get a view of the city from on high, but we soon realised that the low cloud (fast becoming fog) meant that we'd get no views. Then we stumbled on the river, and made a spur of the moment decision to take a river and lake boat tour instead. That turned out to be a pretty good decision -- I've got more skyscraper pictures than you can shake a stick at -- certainly more than you could upload to a web site over a modem in any reasonable amount of time. Here's a tiny sample.
One of the more impressive looking towers used to be the place Oprah Winfrey called home, and although she left, Chuck Norris still lives there.
One thing they pointed out on the tour was the Centenary Fountain, built to celebrate the city's water workers. No, really. What happened was, they were pumping sewage out into the lake, then drawing drinking water back out of the same lake, and a lot of people died, and a lot of other Lake Michigan cities took Chicago to court, and eventually they built a canal and some sewage works, and reversed the river and all sorts of complicated stuff like that. And then they built a fountain to celebrate it all.
Every hour, on the hour, for ten minutes, the fountain shoots a jet of water over the river. This sounded cool, so after the boat trip we walked down to the fountain to see it, and missed it by 5 minutes.By the time we'd had a look around the rest of the fountain, though, it was only another 25 minutes until it went off again, so we bought some (huge) sandwiches from a deli, and sat on a bench stuffing our faces and waiting for the water jet.
In the food store, we finally solved the Kool Aid mystery. It turns out Kool Aid is.... Citric Acid. They're 28c sachets of citric acid, anti-caking agent, artificial flavours and colourings. It comes in a variety of flavours (we bought tropical punch and lemon'n'lime) and you're meant to mix it with water and sugar to make up 2 quarts (whatever they are) of drink. "Do not store in metal container".
Also, Lorna Doones are just shortbread biscuits. How dull.
The fountain duly did its thing:
Although the deli sandwiches were bloody good, we couldn't help regretting not buying a hot dog here:
Now we're waiting for Tom's friend Rob, a Chicago resident who we're
meeting for drinks.