So, after the planetarium, Tanya called us and we agreed to go to a restaurant. Maybe my space-time continuum is getting tangled and it happened a day later, but no big deal - after all, I'm not writing a historical chronicle.
Another panorama of the Loop. Note the number of yachts.
On the way back, we first walked through the already familiar to you Museum Campus. By the way, in the last post I didn't provide photographic evidence that it is located on an embankment made from the debris of digging a tunnel.
Fixing that.
On the far left is the planetarium, in the center the oceanarium, and on the right the museum
Next was Grant Park, named after the great military commander and mediocre president depicted on the 50-dollar bill. If you know nothing about Grant, this phrase from Wikipedia is enough: "in April 1865, after a long series of stubborn battles, Grant forced General Lee to surrender with his entire army, thereby putting an end to the civil war." In the park, we sat on a bench for a long time, but never got to see the big water jet from Buckingham Fountain. And it's worth it - a huge 45-meter-high spout appears once an hour (which we didn't know) and lasts for twenty minutes. Generally, the fountain holds 5 million liters of water, which it spits out at a rate of 900 liters per second from its 133 nozzles. By the way, I checked out google street view - not bad, not bad. To see the fountain there, click to the right.
By the way, during the last two weeks of June (that is, kind of exactly right now), the world's largest food festival Taste Of Chicago takes place in Chicago. There, in particular, they serve Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, which looks more like a pie. Why didn't we try it, huh, Alinka? Generally, there are a lot of things in Chicago that are the biggest and very famous in the world, including the planetarium and the oceanarium.
My sister in front of Buckingham Fountain
Grant Park also hosts famous jazz and blues festivals, the latter of which started on the exact same day as our visit. Even though I'm not a blues fan, I probably would've gone - a live concert of that caliber is always a blast. But my sister is not a music connoisseur at all, I didn't want to torture her, and going alone is no fun.
I must say, there's an innumerable amount of all sorts of wildlife in Chicago's parks, despite the fact that it is, essentially, the city center. Fine, the blackbirds that attack visitors and the squirrels. But where on earth do the rabbits darting out of the bushes live?
This is not a blackbird, but there are a lot of birds like this in Illinois and Wisconsin
Next up was the newly built Millennium Park, which is also part of Grant Park. Previously, its location was a railyard, then a parking lot. In 2004, the construction of the park on the parking lot roof was finished, which, naturally, is once again the largest rooftop park in the world. In principle, it makes sense that the biggest things in the world have to be located somewhere, but it feels like 90% of such things are in the USA.
By the way, you can't smell car exhaust fumes at all. Unlike Riga and especially Moscow, where the situation in this regard is a total disaster. Soon it will be like in some Chinese city where special pipes with clean air are installed so pedestrians can take a breath from time to time and not suffocate from exhaust gases. In Chicago, even on the streets of the Loop it's easy to breathe.
Alina in front of the Pritzker Pavilion.
There is a lot of all sorts of stuff in Millennium Park. For example, the Pritzker Pavilion. Pritzker, unlike Grant, is not a hero, but a Ukrainian Jew, and his family became one of the richest in the USA. The pavilion hosts the only free outdoor classical music festival in the USA.
The steel blob in the photo below is called Cloud Gate and is located on the plaza named after the American Telephone and Telegraph company, widely known for its breakup into many small companies as part of an antitrust case. The blob cost 23 million green presidents, but it was worth it - firstly, a sponsor provided the money, and secondly, the sculpture's popularity is huge. It weighs 110 tons, and strangely enough, it lives up to its name - see the picture. The locals, however, call it "The Bean".
Alina in front of the steel blob
By the way, it wouldn't hurt for those who love to talk about corruption in Latvia to know that the park exceeded its construction budget fourfold, and some of the companies involved in maintaining the park are the biggest sponsors of the mayor's election campaign. That's how capitalism works. The rulers are the stooges of megacorporations, lobbying their interests. Obviously, this option is still better than the African one, where those in power lobby the interests of their relatives and their friends.
BP Pedestrian Bridge - we didn't walk on it, but we walked under it - to the oceanarium
There is a lot more in the park, but I realized that if I write about everything in a row, these posts about the USA will become my main evening and weekend activity right up until the New Year, which might even get boring. Especially since people asked for personal opinions, and not the kind of info that can be found in any guidebook or Wikipedia. Therefore, from now on, expect text only about what I saw with my own eyes and what seemed unusual to me.
