Boston and Chicago

I send this post whilst doing the wonderful job of laundry! Am having a fairly lazy day today which after being so immersed in the world of discovering new places is quite nice! Today is my last day in Chicago, since I last wrote I've also been to Boston. I found Boston a little disappointing. Don't think it's entirely Boston's fault, just that I'd heard so many fantastic things about the place it couldn't possibly have lived up to its reputation! That said, it was a nice city and described very well as a walking city because everything is fairly close. My trip on Greyhound was an experience. It turns out that it doesn't matter what time your ticket is for, if you rock up when a bus is due then you get let on anyway. Not realising this and even though I had my ticket quite a while in advance as I'd had to check out the hostel, I almost didn't make it onto the bus I had booked for as all the other people who had later tickets than me were already on it! Fortunately I was the last person on the bus!! Whilst in Boston I went to a free night out at a comedy club - organised by the hostel then did lots of the touristy stuff - Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, walked the Freedom Trial which takes you round all the important historic places, USS Constitution, Cheers Bar (which is of course nothing like the TV bar!) and visited Harvard and MIT (which was actually quite dull!). On my last day there I went to Salem as having studied The Crucible at school I couldn't really not go, so got the ferry up there and it was such a disappointment. It was just like a Disney Witchland. There was one memorial which really gave you a feel for how traumatic the witch hunt era must have been but other than that it was full of touristy witch and wizard shops and you got hassled to do ghost walks all the time. Seriously would not recommend going there. Anyway, last Saturday I flew to Chicago and what a difference. I love this city! It has such a great feel to it. You're definitely in a big city and yet being on the banks of Lake Michigan (which being a great lake really is huge!) you almost feel like you're at the seaside as well. It even has beaches! Didn't do too much when I first got here as I was staying just one night in a hostel on the outskirts of town as I couldn't get into the central hostel the first night but since then have been out and about. The weather was appalling when I first got here. I left a balmy 28-30 degrees Celsius in Boston and got a not quite so balmy rainy 16 degrees in Chicago. So on came the bottoms of the trousers (they're the zip off ones) and out came the fleece and umbrella! Having been told that this weather was due to be with us all week I bought a City Pass which gives you access to multiple places of interest for cheaper than buying separately and I headed off to the Museum of Science and Industry which was good and huge. Went and had my traditional Chicago Pizza that day from the original place and it was delicious (Shalini - I have a picture of it!). The next day the weather changed and we've had bright sunshine since! Typical! Anyway, the next day I went to the Field Museum which is a natural history museum and it was great! What made it even better was that there were virtually no kids there so I got to play on all the interactive stuff which you usually can't get access to!! From there went to the aquarium, which was just full of fish really - until I turned up at the dolphin pool just in time to see a dolphin display which was excellent and showed you how they use the playtimes to keep a check on the dolphin's health as well. Then went to the penguin area where a few days earlier a baby penguin had hatched which was very cute! That night as I was walking back it turned out to be one of the nights for the Chicago 8th Film Festival to have one of its free movie in the parks nights so I hired a chair and sat and watched "Sweet Smell of Success" and old Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis movie. Had I been here a week later it would have been the Sound of Music! But seeing as the last time I spent a long time from home and I watched that I spent the whole movie crying my eyes out (Mum's favourite film!) I figured it was probably best I was here this week! Yesterday I went to the Adler Planetarium and watched a show on the stars at night so in theory I should be able to point some constellations out now. I blame the light pollution in Chicago for stopping me doing that last night!! From there I went to the Hancock observatory - 94 floors up! It has taken over here from the Sears tower as having the best views in Chicago so will leave the Sears tower for another time I think. In the evening I went to a jazz bar on the pier that had great jazz and did great barbeque. Had 24 hour brisket (marinaded with spices for 12 hours, cooked for 12 hours - yum!!) and then there was a free fireworks display over the harbour.
So today, I'm having a lazy day!! Tomorrow I head up to Minneapolis although at the moment I'm not sure how I'm getting there! I have a train ticket booked but there were floods in South Minnesota a few days ago which washed some of the tracks away! I went to ask at the station what was happening and of course forgot that I wasn't in the UK where it would take at least 6 weeks to put this sort of thing right as the guy said they already had one track running again but I might be being bussed up there. I think the bad weather must be following me - floods in England, floods in New York and now floods in Minnesota. I think I should get sent to drought areas!!