Weekend in the Windy City

We arrived in Chicago on Thurday night after Avinash got off work. The trip down was uneventful and we found our hotel in Addison, which was a Hilton Garden Inn. This hotel was a cut above our usual bargain basement hotel, and featured a HUGE room with two double beds, large bathroom, free high-speed internet, large bathroom, and kitchenette. It also had a pool, restaurant, and exercise room, but we did not check them out.

Friday morning we drove downtown, parked on Wacker Drive for the usual downtown Chicago fee of $27 a day, and walked to the NBC building where the Indian consulate is located. The Indian consulate has a "take a number" system to even drop off paperwork, but it wasn't a horrendously long wait for Mom to submit her paperwork and Yankee dollars for the visa. We were told to come back later in the day after their 3-hour closure for lunch? naps? processing? for the visa.

We walked all the way up Michigan Avenue to Water Tower Place for lunch. After a small detour at the Apple store, we browsed the shops and tried some samples from Lindt chocolate and "Teavana" (a tea shop). Both Mom and Ani liked the raspberry rooibos tea, surprisingly. They featured cast-iron teapots of varying attractive Chinese-type styles. We had focaccia sandwiches at California Pizza Kitchen, and then wandered back down Michigan Avenue toward the consulate.

We had to wait a little while for the visa, since we had arrived earlier than instructed (like typical Americans who cannot follow directions). Mom enjoyed seeing all the different ways the salwar-kameez and dupatta could be worn. After a while, he name was called and we headed back to the car. The weather had not lived up to the warm and pleasant forecast. It had started to rain and was cold and windy. We decided to investigate the Merchadise Mart (not very exciting) on the way back to the car. I made an emergency purchase of sweatshirt and exercise pants at Walgreens (the cheapest place) to cover up. I changed clothes at the parking garage, and we picked up the camera tripod. Then we headed south across the Chicago River to the Art Institute.

The Art Institute offers free admission on Friday evenings all summer, so we took advantage of that opportunity and saw as much as we could before closing time. We saw the major impressionist gallery, the armor gallery, and the South Asian gallery. We will have to go back sometime and see the exhibits more thoroughly sometime.

Next came dinner (at Subway, which surprisingly enough, was not at inflated downtown Chicago prices) and the long trek back up Michigan Avenue to the John Hancock buliding. This is not the tallest building in Chicago, but it is very high and they have just completed a renovation which made it more enjoyable than the expensive, time-consuming, and somewhat anticlimactic Sears Tower observatory. We also had some dollar-off coupons we have obtained on the street earlier in the day, and Mom qualified for a senior ticket.

Avinash, like all foreigners, loves big cities. He wanted to take some nighttime city photos from the observatory, and had brought his tripod along for that express purpose. He had a wonderful time capturing all views of the city, and his photos turned out very well.

After we descended, we made the long trek back to our car and the journey from the downtown to our suburban hotel. We were all tired, having walked about 8 miles that day.

Here's a nice photo of the city lights from Avinash's collection. There are some more photos here