Spring Break: Chicago

We went to St. Louis for part of Spring Break, left the kids there and B and I headed up to Chicago for two days to check out the city in case he ends up at University of Illinois at Chicago (where he's been admitted to the PhD program, still no word on funding).

We showed up Monday after lunch (having taken the long way from St. Louis to get counties for B). We visited UIC first.

We found Jane Addams's Hull-House on UIC's campus. I taught PS about this as part of her Kindergarten History lesson last year. I had no idea it was at UIC, nor did I even remember it was in Chicago.

Then we drove around neighborhoods marking up a map for safe looking areas, etc. B would like to ride his bike to school, or have a short commute by train/bus, and we want to live somewhere safe, but cheap.

In our travels, we passed Wrigley Field.

We checked into our hotel.

We stayed here. It's the one with the greenish roof.
The hotel was super fancy and has quite an exciting history.

And then went to Little Italy, near the UIC campus, for dinner. We wandered into this great little restaurant called Tuscany (that B's since looked up online and usually requires reservations). It was super yummy, not too pricey, and our waiter was truly Italian. I had eggplant parmigian... mmmmm.

The next day B and I walked around downtown Chicago and I took tons of pictures for the kids.

The L Train (for Buddy)

The Chicago River, green for St. Patrick's Day.

I promised PS I'd take a picture since we were there on St. Patrick's Day and she'd just learned in school about them dying the river. Then we woke up that morning and B read that they'd dyed it March 14. Argh. It still looked a bit green, which a native Chicagoan friend tells me is just how it looks, algae and all. So it must have been greener when they dyed it, but this satisfied PS.

Skyscrapers. Our hotel had really cool black and white photos like this
(only a thousand times cooler) up in the hallways.

Me in front of Lake Michigan. I don't think I've ever seen a Lake this huge.

We stopped at a Fannie May candy shop downtown and I got some Mint Meltaways since I'd just heard about them and wanted to taste how yummy they were. Before we left town, we had lunch at Al's #1 Italian Beef... apparently a famous Italian Beef sandwich place (Kristi might be able to back me up on this). Then we headed back to St. Louis (the normal way, no new counties).

Quick Trip to Chicago

I got to go to Chicago for the first time the weekend of August 5th. We left the kids with their grandparents in St. Louis and B and I hurried up to Chicago Saturday and Sunday. B had an audition with Jeopardy! It went well. He's on their possible contestant list for the next 18-24 months. He auditioned for Jeopardy! when we lived in California and made it to their contestant list but they never called... so we'll see.