September 15th 2009
The hostel in Chicago is much bigger and much less friendly than our little home in Toronto, and doesn’t offer the cooking facilities we were hoping for, but it’s clean which is the main thing. It also provides free breakfast which although basic is enough to get you started.
The Millenium Park in Chicago is an area dedicated to art, music, architecture and landscape design. There are free tours of the park available which we plan to take later in the week. They also hold free lunchtime concerts every day all through the summer until the end of September.
Yesterday while we were hanging around waiting to go back to the hostel and check in we had seen a contemporary dance performance (I never did get contemporary dance!), today we enjoyed a performance by a singer called Claire Stahlecker at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in the park. Just her and her guitar and a bass guitarist, it was very relaxing, just sat in the sun soaking up the music, which blends jazz, blues and rock.
One of the good things about Chicago is that there is loads of free stuff going on (great for those on a budget!). All the museums here have free general admission on certain dates, so after the performance in the park we headed for the Addler Planetarium where we wandered around for about an hour looking at exhibits about the Apollo space missions. Jim Lovell who was part of many of these missions is a Chicago native and has donated quite a bit of stuff. Interesting, but nothing really we hadn’t seen at Kennedy Space Centre.
On leaving the museum, we strolled back along part of the 18.5 mile lakeshore path which runs the length of Chicago beside the lake. Weather is lovely here at the moment.
We cut back into town past the Buckingham Fountain which is one of the largest fountains in the world. While in operation, every hour on the hour for 20 minutes the Fountain produces a major water display and the centre jet shoots 150 feet into the air. At dusk, this water display is accompanied by a major light and music display.
