Day 1: CHICAGO

Chicago. After covering the wallet fiasco, we have to address the rest of the windy city experience. Scott rattled off a list of things we need to mention in our Chicago blog, and it went something like this: Cold, windy, greektown, wall-to-wall bed, cold, revolving doors, the El, Deep Dish Pizza, cold, too much light makes the baby go blind, THAT GIRL, snow, cold. Those of you playing along at home can make sure we hit every item on the list.

Chicago is cold. Like, bone-chillingly, can’t feel my nuts (or ovaries) cold, the kind where the wind pushes the cold into your bone marrow where it just chills out and refuses to leave even once you’re in front of a cozy fire, sipping a hot drink, cold smoothie that Marissa bought with one of her mommy’s Starbucks cards. It flurried when we got in, and it didn’t seem too bad until ten minutes elapsed and we realized what this town was all about. It’s about cold, people. Cold and hobos, and some more cold.

Our hostel turned out to be in GREEKTOWN, where everything is written in that one greek triangular font and there are gyro joints across from gyro joints. Our luxurious accommodations were on the top floor of the Parthenon restaurant. This place was like the Cadillac of hostels, with stone showers, plentiful heating, and wall-to-wall bedding. You couldn’t roll off of this beast if you wanted to.

So, as mentioned before, it was FUCKING COLD. So cold that almost every establishment, including 7-11’s, have revolving doors. We have come to believe that revolving doors keep the cold out. One place we went to had two sets of doors instead of revolving ones. Then there were always assholes taking too damn long coming into the place that we wanted to shoot.

The El, as Rhett Miller would have you know, is a cool place to sing about. The thing reminds us of the Grizzly Bear at King’s Do, it’s so fucking ghetto. You know how the DC Metro has nice little lights flashing for the deafies and bigass electronic signs telling the yuppies-in-a-rush when the next train comes? Well, the El does not have such amenities. In fact, the train platform is literally a platform. Like a deck that would hang off your house, built by your dad. But anyway, as many ghetto things are, the El was endearing. We could see the whole city from it, but unfortunately since both of our cameras weren’t functioning, we had to see the world through both our eyes. No more 3X5’s.

So, essentially, we failed in our roles as intrepid tourists, and decided to nap as soon as we got into the hostel. This kind of blew any pseudo-plans to check out the aquarium, meaning our next first stop in Chicago was the Art of Pizza, for what Chicagoans (we assume) have voted Chicago’s finest deep dish pizza. So we set off, and a hop, skip, and a jump away (read: the El, coldass streets, walking in the wrong direction, cursing ourselves, and more coldass streets, nearly giving up and dying in an alleyway before seeing the sign just in time) and we were inside, ordering up a 12” stuffed deep dish pepperoni, made fresh while we waited for 45 minutes and eavesdropped on the conversations of Northwestern kids. The pizza was good. Like, really good, dripping in hot cheese and sauce, with a thick enough crust to contain all of its glory. We each had two slices, which, trust us, is more than it sounds like, and took the other two home, much to Scott’s dismay, who was tasked with forcing his gloveless hands out of their comfortable pocketed home to hold this box for the rest of their icy night. Don’t worry, it was worth it on the train next day, as an alternative to either shitass $4 microwave pizzas or $22 steaks.

So next up was the THEATRE. A show called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, apparently Chicago’s longest running show, for 20 years now, where a group called the Neo-Futurists puts on 30 plays in an hour, and it’s different every week. The whole affair was tainted with the unmistakable air of DRAMA KIDS (and adults, who, let’s face it, are just drama kids who seem a bit more pathetic at this point.) Still, the show was good, and undeniably unique. The audience chose the order of the plays via shouting, the plays themselves ranged from bizarre to funny, to artsy and all combinations of the above. We felt that throwing in the serious vignettes was perhaps not the wisest choice, seeing as the audience doesn’t know when the fuck they’re supposed to laugh and when not to. Protip: it’s NOT during the spoken word poetry about genital mutilation in Africa. Yea, I’m talking to you, asshole in the second row with the inappropriately loud guffaw. Regardless of the hit-or-miss nature of the thing, we both agreed, it was well worth going to. The audience certainly loved it. One girl in particular, standing in line in front of us, was clearly enthralled by the proceedings.

Well, she was enthralled by just about everything nerdy. And she wasn’t letting her theatre partner (read: older internet date OR father, we hope it’s the former but believe it’s the latter) hear the end of it. At about 16 years old with a mouthful of braces, this girl gave the man her uncut insights on everything. First, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: how great it was conceptually, but how unfortunate it was that Buffy was a ditz, and how all of Joss Whedon’s shows are that way. Then, Twitter: social tool or stalking device? Next up, the Next Big Thing: World of Warcraft meets scavenger hunt in real life. Although we missed the best of it, we caught the very end of her rampage on Scott’s mp3 player. Below is an artist’s rendering of Braceface and her two-cents on a show called Radiolab.

In the morning, we enjoyed a nice breakfast at a little local coffee shop that local’s call “Starbuck’s.” We ordered the tea lattes, and they’re seriously good, people. Go try one. We enjoyed the snow from indoors, and man, there was an asston of snow. FCPS would have taken two days off. We boarded the train without losing anything (!!!) and are now on our way to Denver. We will also pass through Omaha, wherein Marissa will pay tribute to her favorite…poet…of all time by listening to him whine for an hour.

PS. For a game that’s funner than homework, but not as fun as anything else probably, try and figure out which portions were written by Scott, and which by Marissa. I’ll give you a hint: If it includes a musical reference, it was DEFINITELY written by Scott.