mim’s blog

I’m finally going to write up some of my thoughts on my cross country trip with Lauren. It’s been nearly a month now since I got back.

On our first day of traveling, we went from Philly to Chicago in 13 hours. It was mostly uneventful, we passed through places that looked quite familiar from other road trips on the east coast. There were lots of farms, the Poconos were nicely fall-colored, and interstate 90 was toll the whole way. We stopped in some little town in western PA for lunch at Perkins pancake house, where we were by far the youngest and slimmest people around. It was noon on a Wednesday. Just before we got to Gary, IN, we hit the time change to central time, which gave us a much needed extra hour, as we were running a bit late. Gary seemed to be to Chicago what Newark is to New York or what Trenton is to Philly.

We got to Chicago at around 9pm and ordered some pizza for dinner. While it was deep dish, I’m not sure that it was Chicago style deep dish. It was a lot like Sicilia’s stuffed pizza in Boston, which I really like, so that was great. It snowed overnight, which was quite odd coming from 70 degree weather in Philly, but it didn’t stick. The next day we visited Millennium park, the Art Institute, and the School of the Art Institute and took an architectural boat tour of the buildings on the Chicago river.

My sister got a kick out of Millennium park because it was a collaboration between lots of landscape architecture firms including some of the ones she’s interviewing with in Seattle. I was particularly fond of “the bean”, a giant reflective steel bean. Photographing it made me think of the series of papers we read in Shree Nayar’s class on catadioptric imaging (using mirrors in imaging systems to get certain photographic properties impossible to achieve with lenses alone).

We had a great view of the park from Maureen’s 14th floor workspace at the School of the Art Institute. Ok, not exactly from the workspace, but from the lounge on that floor. The workspace was a bit more cave-like. The Art Institute itself was huge. It seemed like the collection of art that I was interested in just went on and on, much more so than at the Met. Now they’re making it even bigger, with a lot of construction going on that was also visible from Maureen’s floor. I particularly liked some of the paintings by de Chirico, Beckman, and Ernst.

The architecture tour was also quite interesting, especially for someone who knows very little about architecture. We learned a bit about the Sear’s towers design as nine separate towers lashed together, a proposal to turn the hulking decommissioned post office into a mausoleum for a million bodies, the various phases the architecture of Chicago went through including some sub-phases of modernism, the careers of various architects who designed multiple buildings in the city, and the army corps of engineers’ reversal of the flow of the Chicago river. It was bitterly cold and both Lauren and I were shivering uncontrollably by the end, but it was worth it. I don’t think I’ve ever thought a beverage wasn’t hot enough until we stopped at Starbucks after that tour to get hot chocolates.

That night we ate dinner at a restaurant in Harley and Maureen’s neighborhood, Logan Square, called Lula, which it turns out was the only restaurant that Joanne ate at when she was in Chicago the next week. What a small world. After spending another night there, we took off bright and early the next morning for Madison, WI.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.