Not that I have anything against the Sears Tower (And of cource it was the sinister John Hancock Building that I spied on Sunday-not the tower that junk mail built). In fact I sent this from the lower concourse Starbucks, with half a million tonnes of steel, concrete and office worker above my head. It is big, but I am far from overwhelmed - not as awe inspiring as I thought it would be. I wasn't that impressed with Niagara Falls either, back in 1999. Being desensitized to scale is an occupational hazard of a planetary geologist.
That being said, I didn't go to the top - either because I am cheap, or because I am afraid of heights, I will let you decide.
I spent most of yesterday wandering around the Loop (the urban core of the city, necklaced by elevated train tracks), getting a feel for the layout of the city. I snapped away idly at the soaring verticality of the mixture of new and old skyscrapers, gleaming and crumbling - a virtual "mug me, I'm a tourist" sign affixed to my back. In the Loop, concrete and steel are not just superimposed on the sky - they are part of the sky, grey and black divided by street-shaped channels of blue and white. On Monroe Street, out east toward green Grant Park (the site of the 1968 convention riot that fatally wounded the old Democratic party) there was a spectacular panoramic view of the skyline (sans Sears), red cranes stately swaying above a yellow and silver Guggahime-esce structure rising from Millennium Park in the foreground.
I was also swaying - if not stately. Bad burrito on Sheridan Street the evening before. Vile. I took some photo of myself, blindly (my camera, a Cannon Powershot A70, is not one of those flip view finder cameras) in the small park by the Arts Institute. It was interesting to see (or in this case not see) the effects of the subtle, unconscious facial feedbacks that occur when looking in the mirror - I swear I did not look that bad that morning while shaving, when the Burrito was in full swing. The camera is cruel. Call it a theory for the non-photogenic. The Henry Moore sculpture I shared the park with looked much better.
I am staying at the Chicago International Hostel, way up to the north near Loyola University. In the ethnic geography of Chicago, I would suspect this area is Little India. The hostel is cheap ($17/night) with few distractions (as nothing works). It is convenient to public transport (the El train roars past my dorm room every 5 minutes day or night).
On the first night, as always happens in hostels, I ran into a fellow Kiwi. Richard from Taupo was a true Road Warrior in the geek sense - he worked as an IT consultant in New Zealand while simultaneously touring the world, his office being his 1 GHz Powerbook. Nice work if you can get it. On the second night, I talked with Nerish, an Indian student about to begin a Ph.D in economics at University of Illinois after three years in the corn fields of Bloomington, two hours to the south. We talked for a long time about academia, and the pitfalls of being a foreigner in this foreign land. That old tension for any international student came up: America is where the great professional challenges are, and it has its tremendous all-singing, all-dancing, all-consuming society.
But it isn't home.
Yet.
Posted from Chicago city center Starbucks
