Actually, as a gardener I welcome the spring rain - which we are in dire need of.
I believe it rained the last 3 nights or so, or 3 of the last 4, and the paper predicted it a copuple more days this week.
It’s odd reading all these posts because right now one of the Kunilou twins is in college right in the heart of downtown Chicago (his dorm is across the street from Dearborn Station.) And he’s not enjoying the experience all that much. Poor child, he grew up in the suburbs and he thinks Chicago is just too relentlessly 24/7, with no time for just chillin’.
And Mrs. Kunilou and I, who both have lived in the suburbs for the vast majority of our lives are screaming "You’re living in freakin’ downtown Chicago! Enjoy it! If you want quiet, get on the METRA and ride to Fox Lake!"
He does love Millenium Park, though.
I’ll visit Chicago, if for no other reason, just to have a Honker Ale. I saved a bottle label and laminated it for a bookmark.
Oh, and there’s some restaurants and some theaters too.
Friendly people compared to New York, perhaps, but I’m from Central Illinois. To us, Chicagoans are brusque.
That said, you’d be hard-pressed to find better food in any U.S. city.
You’ve just named my four favorite places in Chicago, but I wanted to correct you and say no, the Berghoff is still there, you just left an “f” off the end when you searched. Why would they close the Berghoff? Why would you even invent such a lie?
Then I checked. The Berghoff is indeed closed. Damn. I used to hang out there when changing Amtrak trains in Chicago on cross-country adventures (it was within easy walk of Union Station). This just shows that it’s been too long since my last visit to Chicago.
The Art Institute is one of my top 3 art museums in the US. MSI is great too, but I have a special soft spot for the Field Museum.
Chicago always makes me smile, even in February when the wind is off the Lake and chills to the bone. Not as much as West Coast cities make me smile, but I think more than East Coast cities do.
[Damn. They closed the Berghoff. What were they thinking?]
I beg to differ. San Francisco is proud to be in California only to the same extent as Manhattan is proud to be part of New York State.
Or perhaps it’s more like DC and Maryland: the city is bounded on three sides by the state, but is definitely not part of the state.
A true San Franciscan, when pushed to name the political entity that includes those areas that bound the City and County of San Francisco to the north, east, and south, will hesitate for a moment before realizing that the answer is “California”. California, where it’s warm and sunny in July, and the Governor is a Republican.
Except for the one in Laboe, Germany.
The official Web site.
I was there from April 4 through April 9. My best friend from high school moved there three years ago and had been begging me ever since to come for a visit, so I finally did. I think part of the reason I waited so long was that I was saving my money for a vaction and I wanted to go back to New York.
I’d always kind of thought of Chicago as “New York lite,” and didn’t really see the point in going there. Now that I’ve been there, I guess I still do think of it that way, sort of, but in a good way. It’s got everything I love about New York—the arts, the food, the architecture, the excellent public transit—but it’s a lot less crowded and more managable, somehow. Also, I love that the El trains are (mostly) above ground. There’s a lot to be said for New York’s subway, but I love being able to look out at the city as I ride the train*.
So, now I’m saving up my money to move to Chicago.
- I’ve never seen so many DirecTV dishes in my life!
I took my son on a spur-of-the-moment weekend. We hit the road (from Chicago) and ended up in fucking Toledo. We went to a comedy club and got the hell outta dodge at morning’s first light.
Heh, kinda ironic - I was in Sand Springs, OK from April 5 through April 9.
I was at the Sox game last night, having a dog when this post came back to me…"Did I write sesame seed?? :smack: "
That’s ok…I went to the authorities and pleaded your case. You don’t have to move. 
The phrase that captures it all is “the beatiful woman with the broken nose.”
Driving up to Chicago from the Skyway, you get to see some of our most successful attempts at evicting nature, and it is ugly.
But it’s a sweet, sweet city.
In New York, or for that matter, Boston, people can be rude because they want to get you out of their lives as quickly as possible. In Chicago, people are rude because they already treat you like a friend.
And it’s got everything.
And the cold weather keeps the whiners away.
Phew, thanks! No doubt the fact that I was at my second Sox game in 3 days, and that they won both games by a score of 13-2 helped my case. And…that during the course of said games, no fewer than 4 hot dogs were consumed by the defendant.
Ok, I will bite as the voice of dissent. I have traveled extensively all over the U.S. and abroad and Chicago always hit a really bad chord with me. Both my mother and wife who travel extensively nationally and internationally say the same thing. We do not care for Chicago at all.
The city is very spooky. These massive buildings rise out of the Midwest earth like a monster yet the city sprawls forever going out in every direction. The local accents tend to be quite unattractive and good birth control. The architecture outside of the skyscrapers is meh except for Frank Lloyd Wright designed houses in the Oak Park area. Those are vomit inducing. That was one of his better periods and yet the man can make you swear off of humanity forever with just one house design let alone a commercial building.
The weather is much worse than Boston as if a ninja just pulled off an impossible feat and made it look effortless. I would assassinate the mayor for destroying Meigs field and secret and I hate the corruption associated with that family. The Great Lakes are not the ocean no matter how much people try to pretend. I lived in New Orleans yet some of the Chicago housing projects really scared may. It doesn’t have the history of the East Coast. The people are just fat, not friendly. They just can’t get enough energy together to comeback with any type of aggressive reply. Chicago style Italian food can make you gain ten pounds just by looking at it although you will probably lose most of that when you puke later in the night from the unnatural gorging that is associated with their food.
However, I did like the science and industry museum and I will fight to the death that the Sears tower is still the tallest skyscraper in the world. That is fairly easy to show even if there are some foreign posers.
Gee, and I always kinda liked you…
Only to defend a few points. Obviously I’m with you as far as the museum and the Sears Tower. I spent 5 years managing the building directly across the river from there, and it never failed to awe me. It also never failed to amuse me when tourists would walk out of Union Station, approach me and ask where the Sears Tower is. “Um, look UP there…”
I must be eating at the wrong places, because the Italian food never struck me as noticeably different from anywhere else. Close friends of the family are as Italian as you get (from Philadelphia), and they’ve expressed their undying love for a couple places I’ve taken them.
The housing projects are truly scary. Thankfully, most of them, if not all by now are torn down. HUD’s “scattered site housing” is moving people back into the neighborhoods and eliminating the towers of gloom.
We don’t pretend it’s an ocean. You have us confused with the rubes in Indiana. 
Eh, Daley’s corrupt. Film at 10 (not 11, we have 10 o’clock news here…). The thing is, he’s gotten more positive things done than he’s hurt. For whatever reason, and I don’t defend it, just explain it, people in the city have always - back to forever, tolerated cronyism so long as things worked for the common folk. They still do, in some ways better than ever. Find me a city with NO corruption.
Meigs Field was a small airport that benefited mostly the elite. His friends in business and government were the ones that howled the loudest when he closed it. In terms of who, and how many people were served by it, it was a nothing. Ok, it was shady how he did that in the midedle of the night, I’m not defending that, but wanting it closed was a no-harm foul.
Fat??? Ok, you got me. Well, not me per se, but yeah some. I know someone’s going to trot out those stats someone comes out with every year about who the “fattes city” is, but I travel too, and I can think of a half dozen places of the top of my head where I see more fat than Chicago.
That reminds me. The words “Chicago” and “any kind of sausage” are almost interchangeable. And we’ve got the **wide load ** signs on our asses to prove it!
With the exception of me, of course.
How odd. I remember chatting with you about a year ago and I thought about getting in touch with you while I was there to see if you wanted to have lunch or something, but my friend kept me pretty busy.
Shagnasty, that was kind of a weird post. I’m not trying to be critical, but a few things you wrote confused me a little.
“Spooky” seems like an odd decription for an entire city, especially one as large and diverse as Chicago. And I’m not getting the whole monsters-rising-from-the-earth imagery you’re going for there. I mean, you could say that about any big city, couldn’t you? Personally, I think that description fits Manhattan Island better than Chicago, at any rate.
You know, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a Chicago accent, even while I was there (most of the people I was hanging out with were from other places and didn’t have identifiable accents). Can anyone name a character in a movie I might have seen that has a strong Chicago accent?
Well, no, because it’s a younger city, it doesn’t have the three- or four-hundred-year history that some East Coast cities have, but I’d say it holds its own, history-wise, considering its relative youth.
Well, I’m pretty large, myself, but I didn’t notice a disproportionately large number of fat people there. And everyone I encountered was friendly, though again, I mostly hung out with friends of the friend I went there to visit.
An aggressive reply to what, exactly? (I’m not being snarky, I’m just not sure what you’re referring to.)
I’m just not sure how to reply to this, but it seems like a pretty broad generalization. I only ate Italian once while I was there (a place called Giordano’s, because I wanted to try deep-dish pizza), and it was really good.
Sorry, my toast was supposed to be of the snark humor variety and I have read much worse things about Boston, New York and others.
I don’t think Chicago is an especially bad place. It is just that I have read many of these types of praises for the city in magazines, here, and newspapers. I have really and truly tried to understand the fascination by visiting and reading about it and I have never quite gotten it. I am an even more harsh critic of the Boston area where I live. I think that I am just not capable of fully appreciating large, cold-weather cities.
I don’t know how many Chicago accents there are but there are certainly some. My (educated) friends that lived there got some big honkin Chicago accents back after they returned after college. The only simple I can think of is pronouncing the city name starting with “Chick” and dragging out the rest of the word.
I can see why other people would love the city and I can recite what it has to offer but it doesn’t click with everybody.