Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

Angela and I took a quick trip to Chicago this past weekend. We had a great time and it was good to get away.

We stayed at the W City Center (nice web site design: it detects my lack of Flash and uses a version of the site that doesn't use it). It was my first time in the W chain and I liked the experience. The W bills itself as being hip, cool and contemporary. They definitely cater to a younger crowd with House and Trance playing in the lobby, the employee's basic black uniforms and the dark color scheme in the place. It can be a little over the top: they refer to the elevators as "the lifts", the lobby is "the living room", the 2nd floor overlooking the lobby, isn't the 2nd floor or Mezzanine, its "the plateau". All in all though, its a great hotel. good concierges too (they arranged tickets for us while we were out and called us on my mobile when they finally got through to the box office).

Although I've been to Chicago many times (esp. when younger since I have family there), this was the first time I was the lead navigator. I found the cities' navigation aids to be subpar. Street signs were often very small and placed in unobstrusive places. They also were of inconsistant size and color scheme (often with non-constrasty colors). They are also stingy with the signs. Often, there was only one little sign per intersection so it could be hard to read while driving or walking (its often way on the other side of a 6 lane street). This was experienced in the loop and on Michigan Avenue, the biggest tourist areas. I imagine it is worse in the less visited areas. Also word to the wise, if you are going to use the El lines as landmarks, be sure to note that the red line and blue line are actually subways in the loop and the River North area of Chicago. This threw me a curveball at first and got us a bit confused. Similar navigation problems exist in the El. Quite a few of the stations didn't appear to have any maps in them or any good navigation hints. They use the system that shows direction by listing the name of the last station on the route. That's fine if you know the system, but awful for visitors. Showing a list of all the stations reached in that particular direction would have helped greatly or even directions (North/South would help (to be fair, the station at Wrigley Field listed North/South and to the Loop/Downtown on the routes). Local maps of the area around the station would have been nice (Paris' Metro does this well).

Stuff we did

The art institute never fails to disappoint. Angela was quite thrilled since is an art teacher. The musuem has a very nice collection of impressionistic and post-impressionistic works. From the placards I read it sounds like a Chicago native who was a contemporary of the artists saw great value in the work and bought a lot of it up (before obviously dontating it to the musuem). Quite amazing to have such an eye to see the value of upcoming (for the time) artists.

Michigan avenue was also overwelming. It was cold and windy and still there was thousands of people about. I couldn't imagine the place when the weather is nice. Ang and I went into the Marshall Fields at Water Tower Place. All eight floors of it with the great big thing of escalators in the middle of the place (made me feel 10 again and with my mother at the big department store in Wheeling). We found the Couture section in Bloomingdales. Good lord the stuff is expensive. I didn't see a dress for under $1700 or a shirt for less than $250. Thank goodness Ang doesn't have expensive tastes. :-). We also had some truffles and gourmet hot chocolate at Vosges Haut Chocolat. I had the Axtec Elixir which features ancho and chipotle chiles. What a nice add...certainly packs a nice little punch. Alton Brown does some similar in his Hot Cocoa recipe. However, by far, the coolest shop we went into was the Lego store. What amazing things they are able to create with a lot of time, a lot of skill (and a unlimited supply of blocks). The Legozilla and a huge, creepy yellow and black spider were most impressive.

Food

For Valetine's Day we ate at the Grill Room (the great conceiges got us a table with only a few hours to spare). The place was nice and the food was pretty good. Nothing leaped out at me to say it was a special place. It probably relies heavily on its location across from a busy theater. For dinner the next day, we had traditional deep dish pizza from Gino's East. It was fabulous, tasty with yummy sausage and not greasy at all despite the hefty crust. Arrive early because a huge line forms and be aware it takes awhile for your order to go through (45 minutes) but the staff is upfront about the wait and they hit the mark exactly.

One negative

The only thing I was disappointed about was Improv Olympics. They are improv theather based near Wrigley Field that was started by one of the old school Second City guys. First off Frommer's Chicago 2004 had us going the wrong way to find the theater (it was off by more than two blocks). We got there as the show was starting (thankfully we had reserved tickets) and therefore got the worse seats in the place (seating starts half hour before the show). Apparently IO offers many different types of shows. What we saw was called The Herald. The site desctibes this as "explor[ing] a single audience suggestion by using group improvisation, monologues and scenes to weave together characters and stories, creating instant theater via 'the group mind' and comedic discipline." Basicly this means taking one audience suggesting and incorporating it into a series of interweaving prewritten sketches that build on each other. By my count there is about 30 herald teams so this is really hit or miss depending on what teams you get to see (we saw three different teams). I didn't think a lot of the material was all that funny and the one, lone audience suggestion wasn't really incorporated much at all into the sketches. There were three bits that were pure improv (one taking the original audience idea and doing a group monlogue (before their prewritten stuff started)), asking an audience member to recount her day then reenacting it with the whole cast and a game where they took turns "freezing" the action, replacing the current actors and taking the scene in a whole new direction. All of this was heavy improv, was damn funny and the actors worked well with each other. My suggestion would be to see if there are resources out there that review the various Herald teams so you can find good ones or go to a different type of show (that's what I will be doing next time).

Oh of course, there are more photos are available.