Escape from New York Part II: Chicago

Ahhh, Chicago. The Windy City. Home of the Bulls. (The who?) The Cubs. (The what?) The Bears. (The which?) Second City. Oprah. And Chicago-style pizza. Is it home of anything else? Probably. Check the internet.

You might remember (you won't remember) that recently I did a post about my visit to Chicago, during which I ogled a wonderfully random and tacky statue of Marilyn Monroe. Well, at long last, here's some pics of the non-Marilyn parts of town.

I was in Chicago to take care of my friend Rachel's cat while she was away in California. I was very nervous about being responsible for someone's cat and house, but Rachel had this very reassuring message on her microwave, which calmed me down a little.

Unfortunately, the next morning I put a to-go coffee cup that apparently has metal in it in the self-same microwave and nearly blew the thing up. (Rachel, I'm so sorry.) But the good news is that I didn't burn the house down or accidentally kill her cat. So I consider the whole thing a success.

Anyway, on to the photos.

Here's one that Rachel took of me in Boystown before she left. As you can see, things get pretty blurry in Boystown.

The top photo and this one above are of, I don't know, two lit-up white brick towers in Millennium Park? With films of women making various facial expressions while cascades of water fell down over them? Pretty alluring.

Was a TOTAL tourist and went to Gino's East for pizza and I'm not apologizing for it because it was delicious. My only criticism is that their pizza display out front is kind of misleading. I was expecting to actually be able to climb on top of my pizza to eat it. But I gotta say, the best meal I had was at Kuma's Corner, a burger joint where all the different types of burgers are named after heavy metal bands, the way God intended.

I got the Kaijo, which I guess is a Japanese metal band? I don't know, Google isn't much help with this, but it's not important, because this is what it looked like:

It was the most delicious plate of heart disease I had all week.

Here are some shots of beautiful downtown Chicago, and Millennium Park. So clean!

And now the pictures I took from the Skydeck at the top of the Willis Tower, formerly known as the Sears Tower. There were these glass balconies you could step onto and see directly below you, which provides a great opportunity to suffer from vertigo.

And then the glass broke, and I started falling, but luckily my return flight picked me up and whisked me into a comfortable cruising altitude.

That's downtown Chicago in the center. Bye, Oprah!