Impressionism: Chicago Day 1

Our first day in Chicago, Friday, was a bit like an impressionist painting. If you stand back a bit and stroke your chin as you take in the whole picture, you see that is it quite stunning and captivating. A work of art. However, if you step closer all you can see are smudges and dots, some even in ugly colors. As a whole, Friday was an amazing day; however, some of the details were frustrating smudges.

Friday can also be related to impressionism because we went to the Chicago Art Institute and viewed several beautiful impressionist paintings. It was breathtaking to be surrounded by exquisite works by Monet and Renoir. My favorites were Chrysanthemums and Seascape by Renoir. We walked around for several hours and saw a special exhibit of Matisse work and other paintings, including Nighthawks.

After lunch we walked around Millenium Park, which is sort of the same idea as Central Park. We saw "The Bean" sculpture, the actual name of which is "Cloudgate". I feel kind of sorry for the artist who created such an awesome work with an elegant name, only to have it referred to as a bean all the time. Haha, oh well. We also walked past Buckingham Fountain and Lake Michigan. We saw lots of flowers and sculptures and Nathan made up "tour information" for us as we went along.

Since we had been walking the whole afternoon and Molly didn't get much sleep we went back to rest at Nathan and his wife Anka's apartment. They live on the 44th floor in the heart of the city. The view was incredible!! It also had a revolving door. Molly and I found all the revolving doors in the city to be quite a novelty. Our guides always just laughed at us.

Friday night we took a taxi to Alhambra's Palace, a Middle Eastern restaurant with live music and dancers. I had delicious chicken tagine. It was interesting though because they had Spanish and Mexican flaminco dancers as the entertainment for the evening. Middle Eastern restaurant...Spanish dancers...hmmm, ok. Molly's other cousin, Jeremy (Nathan's brother), also joined us for dinner along with some of Nathan's friends. It was a fascinating cultural experience.

So, as you can see the day was a good one that definitely gave us a taste of Chicago. But, here are the smudges. I had hoped to be able to rendevous with David on Friday, but at the last minute it didn't work out timing and distance-wise, which was disappointing. I was very grateful to Nathan for being willing to take us around, but something about his attitude towards us made me feel dragged around like a 7 year old. I felt like he didn't trust us to figure anything out on our own and like he was bored of babysitting. This was not helped by the fact that after dinner we stayed at the restaurant for I would guess two more hours while Nathan proceeded to drink. You might know that I have bad experience personal issues with situations like that. Also, the music changed to blaring Middle Eastern music that prevented me from being able to hear Molly even if she was shouting next to me. When we finally arrived back at the apartment I slept on the couch in a jacket with a rolled up t-shirt as a pillow. These parts of the experience made me feel trapped, smothered, awkward, unwanted, and disrespected.

That's why I like the metaphor, though it might be stretched a little, of the impressionist painting. My overall impression of Chicago itself was good and I was excited to move on to the next day.