The rest of the stay in Chicago went by in a relative routine consisting of work and walking around the city (although I’d say more of the latter than former).
Talking about walking, one of the first things I’ve done upon arrival was to buy one of those tiny actibity tracking gadgets called Fitbit. That was actually a present for Branka who in the past few years introduced walking to and from work instead of using public transportation or, god forbid, driving. It’s actually mostly a fancy pedometer with some additional functionalities from which the recorded stats can be uploaded to their web page so that over time one gets a pretty good picture about the distance covered.
Based on that, over the course of 2 weeks the Chicago pavement and soles of my sneakers interacted (counting only the times when I actually had the thingy on me) some for 110 kilometers which, if I may say so, pretty respectable distance.
When it comes to wandering around Chicago, it’s a bit tricky that, as far as I know, there is no obvious demarcation between, let’s call it that way, safer parts of the city and those in which, as locals say, in case you ended up there by accident you should make a nearest cop your best friend or failing that, grab a first cab that comes your way and get the hell out.
Reading about it online, it seems that the western and southern part of the city are best excluded from the sightseeing. True, there could be some great photo opportunities but listening to the radio news one Saturday, they said that last night there were nine shootings, some but not all fatal and, coincidence or not, all nine occured in either southern or western parts of Chicago. With that in mind I focused on the center and northern parts of town while, although it was partially frozen at the time, Lake Michigan to the east didn’t allow much walking.
So, one weekend I decided to explore northern direction and soon I was walking through the neighborhood known as Old Town. Old town in the American context is very different from what we in Europe are used to when exploring say, Prague or even Upper Town in Zagreb. The Chicago Old Town is a very nice area with wonderful brownstone houses, cute little stores and fancy restaurants, and that’s it. It’s not that I didn’t like it, quite the opposite, it’s a nice change from the traffic and noise of the downtown, but if based on the name you expect a lot of history, you are in for a disappointment.
Passing through Old Town I was actually on my way to the Lincoln Park. Not that it’s some grandiose landmark but the Chicago History Museum is nearby which despite high ticket price I enjoyed quite a bit, and it was a piece of greenery (as green as it can be at the beginning of March) where one can see some nature, enjoy some peace and quiet and the Lake Michigan is close by providing, at least in theory, nice view. I say “in theory” because it was cold and there wasn’t much to see at that time of year. Realistically, temperatures hovering around zero Celsius are nothing special but once you factor in the wind (khm, “Windy City”) there’s not much pleasure to expect. Things get particularly nasty closer you get to the coast. Knowing that I will be there basically during winter-to-spring transition and hoping that the “spring” part will prevail, I brought with me some kind of spring/fall jacket which under normal circumstances would serve me just fine since I always prefer to be a bit cold to being a bit too hot, but the wind-chill made it just barely good enough to prevent hypothermia. Fingers suffered most since they were usually exposed either holding a cup of coffee and a cigarette or snapping photos so it wasn’t unusual that for certain periods of time I lost any feeling in them.
The coast I found myself on is probably, under more pleasant weather conditions, a very nice sand beach teeming with people but at this point it provided somewhat unusual sight – a semi-frozen sand. It would be logical not to expect to see a living soul there, but logic sometimes fails.
That particular weekend there was an event going on, appropriately called Chicago Polar Plunge which was basically about massive number of people swimming in semi-frozen lake for some humanitarian purpose (I suspect some participants might have had much less philanthropic reasons, simply being there to shake off Saturday morning hangover in rather extreme yet efficient manner). It was a bizarre experience standing there on the more or less frozen beach, freezing while fully clothed and be surrounded by hordes of wet people in swimming suits happily walking out of the lake in which there was considerable number of small floating masses, better known as ice.
Crazy Americans.
At the end of the beach there was a kind of breakwater from which you have a fantastic view of Chicago skyline but on which the wind was reaching its peak. Further along the breakwater you go, walking “deeper” into the lake, wind is picking up in strength and to make things worse, at the same time there were more and more frozen patches of snow so the probability slipping and getting hit by the gust of wind at the same time, resulting in getting catapulted into the partially frozen lake, was rapidly increasing.
While I stubbornly made my way along the breakwater trying to reach some kind of small lighthouse at its end, I was overtaken by a girl enjoying her midday jogging. Soon, however she turned around and passing by me smiled and shortly commented: “Not worth getting killed”. Since, I suppose, across many, many years of evolutionary arc a blind obedience to breathless, sweaty women got built into the men’s mindset, that was more than enough reason for me to follow suit and go back to some place, if not completely wind-free, then at least protected enough to avoid getting turned into a human popsicle.
As for the photography, as much as my fingers suffered from the cold, the camera (small point & shoot because I was too lazy hauling dSLR to another continent) performed like a champ. Until it didn’t. Couple of days before leaving Chicago I was photographing an orchestra practice in the Chicago Cultural Center when the camera, for no apparent reason, died on me.
Doing some online research, it turned out that it’s a known Canon factory problem which they are fixing free of charge. After exchanging several e-mails with Canon US, I temporarily dropped the issue because the fix was applicable only for camera purchased in US etc. etc.
Considering things started to get worse on all fronts, few days later without much regret I packed my bags and flew onwards to New York.
