Chicago, Baltimore

[triskellian]

There were things I was going to write about the rest of our stay in Racine, but I've mostly forgotten them now, so I'll content myself with saying: I swam in Lake Michigan! Twice! It was lovely :-)

We spent our anniversary in Chicago... and the city was mean to us. Admittedly we could have been better organised, but it just seems to me that it'd be a bit more friendly to tell us when we buy tickets for the Art Institute an hour before closing that we don't really have time to see both the special exhibit (Toulouse-Lautrec) and the regular ones. And what sort of time is 4.30 for a gallery to close? But the art we did have time for was great. Loads of good stuff (Georgia O'Keeffe's pre-flowers-as-genitals stuff, which I hadn't seen before, was a favourite), and beautifully designed galleries (compared with, say, the Guggenheim in Venice, which also contained lots of art we liked, but was an awful space for a gallery). So to make up for that disappointment, we thought we might try to catch the stage show of Wicked, which is on in Chicago at the moment. On every day except Mondays, that is. Guess which day we were there? Time Out directed us to a rather good restaurant, and then we begun the epic trip home. Chicago city centre is scary at night, and the El more so. And the streets around the park and ride where we'd left the car are inadequately signposted. It took us far too long to get back onto the interstate, and we were really wishing for a compass after a while. "We're crossing such-and-such a street," "Which way are we crossing it?" "I've no idea!". Having left the restaurant at about 9.30, we didn't get back to our hotel 60 miles away till about 12.30

And then got on a flight to Baltimore... which is being much nicer to us. N met us at the airport, and whisked us off to her gorgeous house and the gorgeous cooking of E, and a pile of tiny white dogs :-) Yesterday we ate seafood and icecream, browsed an immense bookshop in a former power station, and visited the "National Aquarium at Baltimore"¹, where we paid particular attention to Calypso, a huge turtle with a missing flipper, and lots and lots of rays (we like rays), and tiny spectacularly-coloured frogs. All was well until a tarantula ambushed me in the rain forest exhibit (a tarantula? In an aquarium?)². And we bought the greatest soft-toy octopus evar (even though the actual octopus was missing, possibly dead).

And I now have a new ambition. My asthma prevents me from scuba diving anywhere deeper than a swimming pool, to my great regret. But aquaria have scuba divers who swim with the rays and sharks and turtles and feed them! And the ones in this aquarium are all volunteers who also have day jobs! Now all I need to do is live somewhere there's an aquarium.

¹Some branding department somewhere has evidently decreed that it shall only ever be referred to as such. Nowhere in print is it called simply Baltimore Aquarium.
²No, it didn't really ambush me. It's just that I suddenly realised that there might be spiders, and R was just starting to say a warning to that effect, when I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye. Securely sealed in a cage, but still. <shudder>

And a final note, for those of you in the UK, which I hear is grey and rainy: it's hot here. Very, very hot by my standards, although I've been thoroughly mocked by several natives for saying this - apparently it was even hotter a couple of months ago.

Comments

[lathany.livejournal.com]

Happy Paper Anniversary! Pity about Chicago; at least Baltimore made up for it.