With Clare joining us for the adventure, we bought some CTA passes, and headed down into downtown on the metro (or whatever this is called in Chicago). The weather was ridiculously hot. Personally I've always imagined Chicago to be a cold place, probably due to it being the "windy city" but also because it always seemed to be snowing in every episode of ER... How very wrong I was. It was about 37 degrees Celsius as we mooched from the metro to Millennium Park.
First stop was The Bean, which is a sculpture actually called Cloud Gate. It's basically a giant mirror in the shape of a bean. We amused ourselves with our reflections from different angles for a while but soon got too hot and retreated to a bench to make a plan of action.
We decided to head to the Field Museum at the other end of the park because we had all heard good things about it and mainly because we needed to escape the epic heat. The walk there was further than we had thought and by the end we were struggling to talk whilst trying not to melt. Finally we made it inside the cool, marble, air conditioned building. Clearly visible was a life size T-Rex skeleton; our kind of museum!
As museums go, however, it was quite expensive so I used my should-have-gone-to-drama-school skills to blag a student ticket, telling the woman on the desk that I had handed my student card over for my hostel room key (this wasn't a lie, I actually had.. but it was over a year out of date ha). Kitty followed my lead, and Clare is a genuine student so didn't have a problem.
Once in, we headed straight for the T-Rex, which is named Sue after the archaeologist that discovered it. Sue is a full skeleton of a T-Rex found in South Dakota. Pretty impressive. After staring up at Sue for a while and laughing at how huge scary T-Rex's have tiny little Jeremy Beadle arms, we mooched over into the first exhibition we saw.
It was a massively detailed history of the Native American people in both North and South America. The amount of stuff was immense, I've never seen so many ceramic pots in all my life. From there we headed to watch a 3D film about mummification in ancient Egypt.
By this time it was lunchtime so we headed down to the museum cafe. Museum cafes in America are on a whole other level and Clare and I enjoyed fancy pasta whilst Kitty had a huge salad.
Following this we headed down to find the ancient Egypt exhibition to check out some dead folks. There were loads of mummies on display, including some of children which was quite sad. We then made the strangest discovery of the day... There was a McDonald's... Inside the museum?!!! Inside the actual museum. Purely for this reason it deserved a visit, so we had a second lunch of fries and ice cream. Why not, we're in America?! The size difference between happy meal fries and large fries was hilarious (picture included).
We didn't really achieve much after this, probably because we were high on e-numbers and managed to find every kind of animal funny in the Extreme Mammals exhibition. We also found some kind of ancient ceramic face that resembled Michael Jackson?! It had somehow got to about 4 o clock anyway so we decided to head back to the hostel.
We had hoped that it would have cooled off outside, but once again, we were wrong and ended up walking in silence whilst trying to find the metro station, it used too much energy in the heat to even talk.
We had an interesting experience on our ride home. A man came into our full train carriage and stood in the middle of the aisle spinning a story about how he had been chucked out of McDonald's, lost his job, hadn't been able to feed his kids for days, suffered from asthma etc etc. He made a big deal of saying that he didn't do drugs (thus he obviously did) and even got down on his knees and begged for money to buy food. Needless to say, it was very uncomfortable. Crazy homeless people are a massive issue in America. In this guy's case though, it was interesting that he couldn't afford to buy food yet somehow afforded a ticket to ride the train. Eventually he left, probably to get on a different train and make more people uncomfortable that their country doesn't have any kind of system to deal with the homeless.
When we got back to the hostel, there was a note on Clare's bed from Lauren asking if we wanted to go to the comedy club that evening. Soon after, Lauren returned, but when we looked up the comedy club it was sold out. We decided to buy some alcohol instead and drink it up on the roof deck of the hostel, which had a cool view of downtown Chicago. Our mission to buy some alcohol was amusing as Clare is only 20, so was scared of getting caught (even though she had fake ID) thus waited outside the liquor store hiding, like she was 14 again, whilst Kitty, Lauren and I bought some alcohol.
We started off the roof deck trend that night by being the first ones up there, but we were soon joined by other people from the hostel who tried to turn it into a frat party as ever. I had a good life chat with Lauren, which Kitty also joined in on whilst Clare got stuck talking to a slightly creepy Welsh guy called Marc because she was too nice to ignore him. He proceeded to follow Clare around for the duration of his stay at the hostel which the other three of us found extremely funny of course!
At one point, I went downstairs to get something and Kray was sitting in the kitchen area with some other people. As I walked past she said, 'ey beautiful, where you from?' which was creepy since she had already asked me this in the dorm at some point. Whilst Lauren had been in the hostel during the day, Kray had tried to offer her food, which we later found out was actually ours... Kray was beginning to show her true colours.
EXTREME MAMMAL EXHIBITION. Excellent.
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