30/05/10

(reporting 31/05/10)

We spent the night just outside of Chicago so that in the morning we could jump on the “L” and head into town. The L train system had an utterly stupid ticket system; you buy your ticket at the station as normal, all apart from the day travel card. For that you have to walk half a mile down the road to a random shop and walk back. Who thought this would be a good idea??!? A pointless waste of time. The signs were also really badly done, for example at the station we were at there was a sign pointing towards the platform saying “Northwest bound”, but nothing for the east bound trains downtown, which were actually on the same platform. We had other problems with the hopeless signs later in the day, but I’ll get to that in due course.

Our first train took us to “the loop”, the famous elevated train system around downtown Chicago. Our first actual stop in town was to go to the tourist info centre, a good place to start. From the train we went into a building with a huge banner above the door saying something to the effect of city tourist information. When we went in and asked they said that the tourist info was across the street in an otherwise anonymous building. So the building that said tourist info wasn’t actually the tourist info building! What were they thinking!??!?1 This isn’t even the last of the sign issues!

We finally found the tourist info in the old library, which was an amazing old building with marble staircases and stained glass domes. It was at about this time I realised that I had left my camera in the car, dang! I had to take photos on my crappy phone camera. There were a couple of free art exhibits going on in the building, one of which was actually really cool. I’m usually not big on the modern art thing, I don’t see the point in most of it, but this was different. There were simple sculptures made from thick corrugated cardboard, but with an illusion of extra depth given by the angles at which the cardboard was cut and pencilled lines and rubbings on the board itself.

After the art we went out towards the centre of architecture to see about tours of the city, but they were fairly booked up and more expensive than we were interested in, so we headed out into the town to just take it in instead. From the architecture centre we wanted to go across the road to Millennium Park, we thought we saw a subway going under the road, so went down some stairs into what turned out to be a carpark under the park. We thought that there must be a way up at the other side of the road into the park itself, so we walked into the carpark towards a doorway marked pedestrian exit. Was it a pedestrian exit though? Of course not. It had an alarmed fire exit and a door to the next level of parking, which we took thinking that we were one floor closer to the surface. We tried another set of stairs similarly marked, but this one was just a locked door. After wandering aimlessly around this carpak for a few minutes we saw another exit with people coming out of it, this lead to a train station. We followed “exit” signs, which led to the train platform, which had no exit. After retracing our steps to the station we found another platform and a waiting room but no exit. Eventually we found an anonymous door with sunlight coming down which led to the surface. What the hell is going on in this city???!? In London there are exit signs everywhere, all leading to the exit as prescribed, here the signs seem to be some form of joke to confuse tourists. America in general is actually pretty bad at signposting things, but Chicago is simply hopeless.

The park had some bizarre arty structures dotted around, the first of which was a pair of cuboidal waterfalls made out of glass bricks. On the faces facing each other were images of faces (that’s three uses of “face” in one sentence, all meaning different things :D) looking like they were spitting a stream of water. This piece was very popular with children, who were cooling off in the water. Along from that, there was “the bean”, a highly polished blob. The surface was convex and concave in different areas so the reflections of the people and city were really interesting. Then there was a fantastic ultramodern outdoor concert area, which had a metal lattice above the lawn which apparently improves the acoustics. We then went for a wander along the lake shore to the planetarium and back into town for lunch before looking around the buildings.

Chicago is famous for its architecture and rightly so. It is almost a showcase of the history of the skyscraper. The downtown area has an astonishing array of building styles and sizes, ranging from the 1880's and the very first steel framed buildings to the Willis Building, once called the Sears Tower, was the tallest building in the world until 1998 and is still the tallest in America. There is also a nice selection of styles; art deco, gothic, ultramodern etc all within a walkable distance. I actually think that Chicago has a better skyline than New York, although it has less well known buildings.

We managed to get out of the city with no problems as we didn't have to read any signs this time. We got out into Indiana where we stopped for the night. We did try a couple of caches for Indiana and Michigan, but were not successful, trying again in the light would be a better bet.

Cube out