The nice part about bringing my bike with me is that I don't feel like a tourist. It also helps that I have been here before and am staying with friends. I am grateful for that, I would never had gotten to know Chicago even a little without that connection.
I've been hearing about Liz working with clay for a few years now, but she never has shared pictures. Being here, I'm getting to see what she's been doing, and like too many women who have some real stuff coming out of them, she doesn't see how good it is. Here's a photo of the bowl I wheedled out of her.
Still not getting enough sleep to recover, so I'm going to stick around Chicago for another day or so, I need to get a full night's sleep. I'm hoping that a 14 mile bike ride today along the lake will help with that. It's not a ride you can dream away on, there are too many people standing around on the bike path, unattended children ( who appear to possibly be in the early stages of being put up for adoption ) hookers looking for trade, tourists and people on bikes who are clearly training for something all vie for space with pedestrian traffic and more runners than I would have guessed.
I know I have been living in NH, and many people are glued to their personal screens there, but there was something unsettling about seeing how many were plugged in to something, or were staring at their iPhones, oblivious to anything going on around them. Why be outside at all? Why not have a video of the lake going while working out at a gym? Certainly not everyone was checked out and those who were not seemed particularly alive. Is not living in the present like drowning in an inch of water?
It was worth it to visit the Bean, and see what other imaginative projects are going on downtown. We were trying to figure out what all these people were doing at what looked like a spin class, music blaring, people sitting on spin cycles, not moving, or moving occasionally. Crowds taking pictures of their reflections in the Cloud Gate [The Bean…] were a sharp contrast to the first time I saw this place the week Obama was elected. The weather was not so cooperative, and it was easy to get close to the sculpture. It also was not coated with fingerprints from the ground to as far up as people could reach standing on each other's shoulders. Public sculpture with the power to excite. What a concept.
Chicago is huge, and yet manages to feel like a town. People are relaxed and unguarded, milling around as though they have plenty of time, helpful and free of suspicion when asked questions which one might expect to be ignored in Boston. This photo is of a pavilion that has chess boards embedded in the concrete. Most of them were in use.
A view of the city from the bike path.
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