Chicago is...

Chicago.

The sky is flashing and strobing the city buildings into a state of sudden white bleach. It is late at night.

The city is roaring. The drone of its dense life is like a jet flying constantly aloft. There is an odd undulating rhythm to it. We are between thunderstorms. The calm between two storms. The last one bellowed and whacked and cracked and pounded the city, hammering it in rain so hard and dense that the buildings next door simply vanished behind its thick grey veil. When the rain stopped, the people reappeared en masse, glamorous and purposeful. Where had they been?

It is Saturday night. This is a party city. This is a boozy city. Restaurants are everywhere amid the high rises. Bars and clubs abound. The streets were packed again with cars, traffic jams, impatience, horns. Chicago is a city of horn-blowers, beaten only by Kuala Lumpur in my experience. It is also a city of sirens. They honk and wail throughout the day redoubling their frenzy during storms.

This is a big, vertical city. I look around to windows and more windows. In different degrees of illumination. Lives going on within them. I can make out art on walls, TVs flickering. Down below, the traffic hurtling, the people scurrying. Long-haired girls in skin-tight thigh-high sheath dresses milling around and smoking and queuing outside the clubs. Valet parkers caring for their charges in their neatly jam-packed lots. Young men, faces illuminated by their iPhones as they lope along the streets.

This morning I wake at 4am and see the streets still busy. I would say that it is a city which never sleeps but at 8 am on a Sunday morning it has tired its mighty self out. Nothing is moving.

We’ve had six magical days here at the dear old Hampton Inn & Suites Downtown - a couple of blocks from the river and walkable to the Navy Pier, the art gallery…

I had booked a self-sufficiency suite here months ago and was thrilled to see it was spacious with three rooms on the most prominent corner of the hotel with fantastic street views. We unpack and settle in, then try to log into the WiFi. Disaster.

It simply does not work. We can get a sort of download if we stand in the corner by the door. Or if we go out into the hallway by the lift. But this is not how we want to live for six days in Chicago. We need to download papers. I need to blog. We are connectivity people. We call the desk and speak to Jeseca. She tries try to help. She connects us to AT&T. They run tests with me…time consuming and tedious tech stuff. Then they announce there is a problem and they don’t know when they can deal with it. Is there anything else they can do for me? Eh? Doh! No. Make the internet function. That is what I want. Sorry, we can’t do that today. We can’t say when…

The hotel is embarrassed. We have the best room the the place. Any room change is a downgrade. I don’t want to change rooms. I love our room. I’ve looked forward to it. We have planned things we want to cook for ourselves. We are missing culinary autonomy, our own food.

It’s getting late. Frustration is immense. Jeseca is passionately sympathetic but powerless. She gives us a voucher to go to a trendy hot dog place. We go.

It is a zany Chicago madhouse, like the Royal Show with people at windows shouting out numbers, hot dogs, burgers and pizzas being churned out by the score, mountains of chips, huge goblets of beer, donuts… Noise, movement, colour, queues. I order chili and salad. We share a beer. The food is average. The experience is fun.

The next morning I check with the desk’s Janeli to see if AT&T are coming to fix the WiFi. Surely a booster is all that is needed. The WiFi works down the straight lines of rooms. The problem is that it is not turning the corner to our corner suite.

Janeli confers with management. We go out. On our return hotel Jeneli reveals that the management has been unable to get any action from AT&T so all it can do is to offer us another room, a lesser room, of course. So we lose our magical suite and move onto the top floor at the back of the hotel to a perfectly nice small suite with a much less exciting view. We get a discount. The WiFi is fantastic.

It’s been a productive break in the trip.

It has been a time to rationalise luggage, to do washing, to swim and sun, to read and to see friends. It has been post-office time. Two boxes of our own overload to go home to Australia and a smaller one full of goodies for the grandchildren. We read and hear of the pressure under which the postal system is crumbling - and now we see it. Just two workers and a queue of people which stretches across the cavernous post office and out the door. It took about 90 minutes to get to the counter where the African-American worker is charming, competent, and utterly unruffled.

The city is teeming with tourists.

This hotel is swarming with them.

The river tour boats are jammed with them.

The city is at its best for them, in a glory of summer flowers and working overtime.

Walking to the pier we find the people-watching almost as fascinating as the skyline. Well, not quite. The Chicago skyline is stunning from every angle. Here on the pier we have tall ships and tour boats, a funfair, and a line of restaurants. We choose one and are given a rock star patio table in the shade. In this remarkable place we have unremarkable foods.

That evening we are reunited with our friends of Nashua days, Janet and Bruce Jenkins.

They lived in Massachusetts then, Bruce running the film school at Harvard and Janet editing art books for European publishers. Janet and I had met on IRC back in the day. In fact we had shared the horror of 9/11 together online. We had enjoyed a number of meals together in New England, particularly at an Afghan restaurant in Cambridge. Now Bruce is Prof of film, video and new media at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. We are able to

walk to their place on the other side of the river. It is a pleasant walk. Their condo is magnificently located and a very secure, roomy and pleasant place. Janet makes us Brazilian drinks incongruously in honour of the Olympics and we catch up on the years in a torrent of conversation.Then we walk to a nearby restaurant run by a South African sommelier. The wines selection is bedazzling. The food is very nice. The company is joyful. We talk and talk and talk. We talk our way back to their condo. We talk to the car and, as Bruce takes us on a wonderful night tour of Chicago, we talk and talk some more. We part warmly - with Bruce offering to meet us at the Art Institute gallery the next day and have us admitted as his guests.

This we do, taking our time to walk the park and watch the children sporting in the imaginative city water features. There are two brick towers from which water cascades and on which huge faces appear in gentle and passive expressions until, suddenly, a big jet of water emerges from the mouth. Children wait in a thrill of expectation beneath these faces, squealing and leaping when the water jets appear. We are enchanted and watch for some time, noting with pleasure the encompassing racial mix of the children sharing the water.

Bruce greets us on the Institute steps and escorts us through, giving us directions for the best way to see the most.

He goes back to work and we repair to the cafe for lunch which is chosen from a series of counters - sandwich, hot specials, pizza, grill… I can’t resist red cabbage and yellow squash with salmon. Bruce picks pizza. We sort out the queues and payments and make our way into the courtyard where we sit under a sunshade and watch the water fountain and the proud Gallery matrons socialising in their gladrags.

The food is divine.

And so, of course, is the gallery. Some of the great art of the world. We revel. We swoon. We sigh. We smile. We ponder. We walk through whole periods, fauves and monotonists, surrealists and landscapists - from de Chirico to Renoir and so many Picassos that one began to

yawn (not).

The gallery is busy but not too busy. We can move about and enjoy everything. We do this until our feet are aching. We stop and find another cafe and have a macchiato. Then we get going and do more.

By the time we have walked back to our hotel, our pedometers tell us we have covered 11 km and climbed 22 flights of stairs.

We treat ourselves to a date at Ruth’s Chris Steak House for dinner. This chain specialises in the best steaks in the country. It is a very rich and indulgent dinner.

I try to get in some serious pool exercises in the morning to make up for it. Bruce joins me to read in the sun for a while. The hotel has an excellent pool and a lovely adjacent sun patio in a canyon of high brick walls.

Then we go for a river walk, a city walk and a visit to Macys, which is immense. A grand department store of the classy old school which swarms with staff on the ground floor but is sparsely staffed on what seems like its hundreds of other floors. The place, which used to be Marshall Fields has a huge open atrium which is many floors high and topped by a handsome mosaic…so high up. One gets vertigo riding the escalator. Believe me.

The evening is reserved for my cherished former Tiser colleague Katie Spain and her English beau, Adam. The co-incidence of Katie and me being in Chicago at the same time absolutely needed a celebration. They meet us at the hotel and we decide to try Dirty Dick’s for dinner - because it is right on the river. We ask to be seated outside on the balcony over the river. It is hot and steamy, so much so that our appointed waiter complains bitterly about having to come out and serve us. Being rude to the patrons, it turns out, is a big part of the schtick at Dirty Dicks. While we talk and eat outside, all sorts of ghastly shenanigans are going on inside. People are all wearing big silly white hats with crude things written on them. No wonder the food is a bit on the average side. Oh well. The wine is good and the company terrific.

Friday is the big date. Val Bock, a fellow member of the Brainstorms community, has offered to host us on the famous Architecture River Tour of Chicago.

Val and I have not met before but we recognise each other instantly.

At Val’s suggestion, we take the teacher’s pet position in front of the Tour’s docent. Good thinking. It is very immediate and gives us a more intense awareness of the nuances of her focus. One has to be quick, though. This docent, one Claudia Winkler, has mountains to impart and she does so in machine-gun, rapid-fire delivery. She pauses only twice during the 90 minute tour, briefly, just to sip water, She does not seem to feel the heat.

She is absolutely engrossed in and expert in her subject. We are riveted and swivel-headed. The towering skyscrapers are magnificent, all the more so for the explanations of their whys and wherefores. They make me weep for Adelaide which has so sorely missed the boats in architectural aesthetic. It was once noted as a pretty city. Once, when it had colonial buildings and big, shady verandahs. But those who achieve control by shouting that history means “mothballs” have surrounded us with a city of brutal glass boxes. Dull, cheap, depressing. Architects, developers and town planners have de-spirited a whole community with their thuggish penny-pinching.

Everyone should come to Chicago to see how an urban jungle becomes an art work when developed as a project in integrated design. “Contextual” is the word that our docent used. New buildings are fastidiously designed to complement their neighbours, to reiterate the shapes and rules of the classics. Even the mighty Trump Tower respects these rules of context and aesthetic and is, in itself, one of the beauties of the skyline. Um…we won’t say anything about the huge “TRUMP” sign on the front. Trump is the Polites of Chicago. “Adaptive re-use” is the docent’s other catch-cry. Old warehouses are born again as apartments and condos through restoration, renovation and the addition of hanging balconies - which are one of the striking ubiquities of the city,

Val takes us for a bit of a walk after the river tour. Back to her place for a glass of iced tea. We really need it. It turns out to be a five-mile walk and the day is hot. But the route is wonderful, straight across the city all the way along Millennium Park and along Grant Park, past the mighty lines of foreshore buildings. I find a doll lying on the hot pavement. A very fresh, new doll. Some child must be bereft. The doll looks sad and lost, too. It's all a bit poignant. I put the doll where I hope she might be found. We forge forwards following Val. Val is a fit woman and does a lot of city walking.

A mile or so on, we pause momentarily to admire the scale of the lake. I ask a gentleman sitting alone and admiring the view if he would mind sharing his park bench with us. He is an elegant man and his accent is English. You’re a Brit, I tell him. And so a conversation begins which reveals that he has not only been to Adelaide but lived there as a professor of Theatre at Flinders University. John Green is his name, now chair of the School of Fine and Performing Arts aka Theatre at Columbia College, Chicago. He loves living here, even in the famously wicked winters.

Val’s condo has a spectacular view of the lake which is very busy with watercraft of all sizes. She points out a large carpark in the foreground of her view. Here, she says, Obama’s big black Marine 1 chopper lands whenever he comes to town. They close Lakeshore Drive, security is intense, and it takes all of four minutes to move the President from the chopper to his vehicle and whoosh, he is off to his Chicago home just down the way. He’s a Chicago boy, after all.

Taxied back to the hotel, we take it a bit easy on the pool patio. It is not always easy getting swims here thanks to the domination of children. I have yet to meet a parent who offers any consideration towards a grandmother trying to do exercises in a corner of the pool. Quite the opposite. They do their passive aggressive best to drive me out of the water so the kids have 100 per cent splash and dive space. My regard for American manners has nose-dived from the frequency of this phenomenon.

Strolling out in what we now feel is “our” bit of Chicago in the neighbourhood of River North, we choose a modern Mexican restaurant for dinner. We score another rock-star table for two on the sidewalk patio. A glass of interesting Spanish wine and a jicama salad. Oh, my, why don’t we have jicama in Australia? What a fresh and lovely vegetable with a lime and green mango treatment. A grilled redfish main with Mexican salsa and rice. Bruce’s haddock gets the thumbs-up, too. Healthy and divine. We swan off into the night and sabotage it all with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s.

Our last Chicago day has been one of just relishing the city. We have meandered the streets and leant on bridge rails gazing and watching with that glorious sense that the clock is not watching us. We have strolled the riverwalk and sat among the tourists and locals, listening to the live music in the riverside wine bar and watching the world go by. Studying the details of the buildings. Soaking it in. Soaking it in.

We have loved it here.

Chicago, you’re our kinda town!