In July, we visited Chicago to take part in the Rock'n'Roll Half Marathon. It was just a quick weekend trip, but we still managed to see a bit of the city.
In the middle of the city is a huge park called Millenium Park. I love city parks, they are usually amazing. This one had a huge green lawn where we saw an outdoor yoga class taking place...
An outdoor concert space complete with "modern art" touches...
And some more modern art - this one a giant reflective jelly-bean, which was cool for taking funny photos. You can play Spot-the-Vicki-And-Stephen in this photo...
... and in this one too :)
Chicago as a city was very cool. There was an above-ground train loop that ran around the city which made us feel like we were on the set of a Batman movie.
Much of the downtown area is multi-level, but you don't know until you stumble across something like this that shows it clearly.
The city was full of beautiful buildings - we went on an "Architecture Boat Tour", which basically drove us up and down the rivers on an open-top boat looking at the buildings on each side while a guy with an architecture degree explained the different styles and movements to us. We were hoping to get an evening cruise (the middle of summer is very hot and humid in Chicago), but apparently every other tourist in Chicago had the same idea, so we ended up on a 3pm one - middle of the day's heat in this part of the world. For two Australians, sitting on top of a boat in the middle of the day sounds like a death sentence of sunburn and pain and future skin cancer, but the sun isn't so dangerous here apparently as we managed to stay sunburn-free.
We don't know a whole lot about architecture, but there were many gorgeous buildings - I have a lot of photos but I thought I'd cut it down to just three so as not to be too boring. Here's an example of an old-fashioned building...
... a modern building...
... and a modernist building (hey look, we did learn something). This building is car parking at the bottom and apartments at the top, and is apparently nicknamed the "corn cob".
Apart from the sightseeing, there was one other reason to visit...
The course was beautiful and ran over a large number of bridges through various parts of Chicago. It was pretty warm (80% humidity and 28 degrees) so we didn't run personal bests, but we had fun :)
Stephen ran 1:30:40, and I ran 2:21:44.
We celebrated the run with an authentic Chicago deep dish pizza - it's nothing like what we would call pizza. There's a layer of dough at the bottom, then the toppings and cheese on top of that, then another layer of dough and then the tomato sauce on top. It was delicious and hugely filling - so filling that we couldn't finish the other half of this pizza despite having run 21km beforehand.
All in all Chicago was a beautiful city and we had a great time, and we'll hopefully go back in the future for the other half of that pizza!
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