Chicago

Sitting at the airport McDonald's right now, waiting for our flight to start boarding, which is about an hour away. The AA desk here didn't seem nearly as complicated as the United one in San Francisco. Today, we're headed to New York City.

Please form ten lines in any direction you please

We got to the airport in the morning and split up to our individual flights - mine being United, and Liza's being American Airlines. Liza seemed to get through really quickly, while United seemed to have a confusion set of mazes to get through to get your bag checked in. Apparently my ticket was a paper ticket (despite it having an e-ticket number on the actual ticket), so I needed to go see an agent, of which there was about 3 servicing 10 lines. When I got to the front of the queue, I waited about 10 minutes only to be told that my ticket was a paper ticket I needed to be in another queue. Thankfully, the agent took care of it anyway. I couldn't have been the only one feeling that the system was a bit disorganized, because even the people who had tickets were getting a bit annoyed.

Having gotten through the first set of obstacles set by United, I checked my bag and proceeded through the security check. When I got to my gate, I found another set of fun and exciting challenges, United style. It wasn't so much a challenge for me as it was a challenge that they seemed to set for themselves, as they still had to assign seats to confirmed passengers. Why this couldn't have been done prior to boarding, I do not know. The flight was actually overbooked, and they were offering confirmed passengers a later flight plus a return ticket on any United flight anywhere in the United States just to free up room. I considered the offer, but without conferring with Liza and the people we were staying with in Chicago, I decided to just sit there and wait for them to call my name out and give me a boarding pass.

The flight itself was fine. I watched a movie and caught a bit of a nap before landing at O'Hare airport, reputed as the world's busiest airport. It wasn't really made to seem that way when I arrived, since the airport was really well laid out, and seemed to operate quite efficiently. In any case, I got to my baggage carousel and met with my aunt Jean and uncle Ernie. We then went to the AA terminal to meet up with Liza before heading back to their place in a northern suburb of Chicago.

The not-too-windy-but-quite-hot city

Our first day in the windy city was a mixture of expensive disappointment and cheap thrills. The Holography Museum was our first stop. The museum was pretty interesting, but the five dollar cover was a bit steep for such a small display. The Sears Tower was our next stop. I'll have to warn future travelers that this tall office building would only be worth the $12.95 to get to the observation deck if the weather is very clear (and I mean unlimited visibility), and if you plan to stay until night time, when I imagine you would be able to get some really nice night shots of the city. We got up to the deck after a short introductory movie to find haze as far as the eye can see. It was perhaps one the biggest ripoffs of the entire trip so far, but I guess we only have ourselves to blame for not considering the conditions (not that it looked too bad from down below).

We got out of the building soon after entering and looked for some excitement. We found it in Millennium Park. After a quick look of Buckingham Fountain, we headed to the north end of the long stretch of parks to find the highlight of the day - a giant reflective kidney bean. Oh, sure, it doesn't sound all that interesting, but trust me, it was damn good, especially after the huge disappointment of the Sears Tower. The shape of the artwork (a giant kidney bean, which gave its nickname) and the reflective surface made it a fun house of mirrors in one big structure. It was really cool. This proved to be our last stop of the day, and we soon headed back home.

Our second (and last) day in Chicago was a lot better than the first. We went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, which was free, the conservatory, which was free, checked out the shopping district, which was free (except for the Levi's jeans I bought, which were half off - a lot cheaper than I was expecting to pay for a substitute for my ragged old jeans), checked out a skate shop, which was free, and got to see a crazy man, which was free. The story with the crazy guy was that we were sitting on the train, heading back to the house, and there was this random dude in the train car just laughing his ass off at nothing, speaking to random people and himself, and making absolutely no sense at all. A big dude walked into the car at one of the stations, and the crazy guy just started talking to him, as if he knew him. It was pretty entertaining. The only bad thing that came out of the day was that we missed the night's episode of Hell's Kitchen due to the show being shown an hour earlier in Central Time regions. We went to sleep relatively early to catch our early flight (6am) to New York City.