The Second City

After Natties I got on an Amtrak train with my buddies Palmer and Shep. I had never ridden a train in the states and was pumped. After so much time in the hectic world of the American air travel industry it was refreshing to take a step back and just relax on our under appreciated railways. It was an 19 hour train form Denver to Chicago. It was totally full in Coach and we couldn't even find seats right next to each other. It didn't really matter though because we spent most of our time in the lounge car. We stayed up late that night playing a board game we're now addicted to called Pente as well as hearts and getting drunk on a bottle of Rum we smuggled aboard. We shared our games and and our Rum with a guy we met named Dan who was quite the character. He was later caught stealing expired microwavable hotdogs from the train. He claimed he had everything stolen from him in San Francisco. He also lied, a lot. In fact there wasn't a whole lot redeeming about Dan. But we road the rails and had a nice time.

Some observations about Amtrak-

-There are some characters on the train. Besides Dan we met there two crazy girls who had to go to Ohio to deal with an outstanding warrant for Marijuana possession and who had some Angel based taro cards.

-The service staff was predominantly black. I know that the porter and rail service industry was historically dominated by African Americans but I was surprised to see how much it had persisted after all this time. Not unlike sky-caps at airports I suppose.

-Wow, there are so many fat people on Amtrak. I guess the seats are bigger and since they aren't assigned they can often get away with having two. Still it was ridiculous. I don't know if I have every seen such a concentration of overweight people in my life.



So we got to Chicago and took and took the bus to my friend Jesse 'Sheriff' Marshall's apartment. The bus system in Chicago incidentally is amazing. It goes everywhere you could want to go and does so often. I hope to live in a city with such a great system someday. It was lame carrying all my stuff around, I've got a lot seeing as how I had to back for over 4 months. We didn't do much other then down some deep dish pizza the first night. The second day was fun. We slept in (we didn't get a bunch of sleep on the train) and had a nice brunch. I walked around the city for a while, while Shep and Palmer watched Soccer. We then walked around together and had a drink at the top of the Hancock building (96th floor) which was cool. Then we saw a play called the "The Ballad of Emmitt Till" a retelling of the story that sparked the American civil rights movement. It was good but not great.

The next day we went to the Field museum which was awesome. Not as good as the natural history museum in London but very impressive. They had a great exhibit on the evolution of life on earth. I love museums, especially natural history museums so I really enjoyed it. Then we went down to Navy Pier because Shep and I had never been there before. After that we went to the Chicago Institute of Art which is free Thursday evenings. It was nice but they were doing a lot of renovations. They had a good modern/contemporary section but I was hoping they would have some Stuart Davis or Botero and they had neither. Still they had some neat Picassos and cool Dali plus one by Tanguy that I really liked. The highlight for me was actually the miniature rooms. Kinda nerdy I know, but I liked 'em They had an section on 1in:1ft scale rooms that were done by one artist. They were mostly American and European drawing rooms but there were others as well. The detail was amazing. I highly recommend anyone that the museum taking the time to see it. The guys went back to Sherriff's but I wanted to see this other show I had heard about. It was called Boys and Girls and it was two separate one act plays. It was in this tiny theater, there couldn't have been more than 100 people. I loved it, especially the first one. I won't try to describe it now, but ask me about it later, it was great. That evening we partied with the University of Chicago ultimate teams whom Sheriff plays for. They play this crazy version of beer die which was pretty fun if quite slow. My friends got drunker then I did but it was fun.

The next day Shep went back west and Palmer went to have lunch with a friend. I was waiting for my bus for Minneapolis and I got yelled about for sleeping on concrete. Apparently someone owned that particular piece of concrete. I got on the bus eventually and headed to Milwaukee where Palmer would meet me off of a later bus.