Sweet home Chicago

Spoiler alert: I made it to L.A. safe and sound a week ago, in case you were wondering. Since then, I've been working on the obvious things - place to live, source of income, and generally settling into this new thing. I do want to finish documenting this trip, though, so I'm going to keep at it in chronological order, with updates as often as I can manage them. Without further ado, then, rewind about three weeks:

If it weren't for the fact that I know a number of my family members read this blog, I might go ahead and say something about how Chicago seems to be trying to compensate for something, given its obsession with skyscrapers.

Oh wait. Guess I'm saying it anyway.

Seriously though. What else is there to say about a city that looks like this?

I suppose Manhattan probably rivals it, but not only is Chicago considered the birthplace of the skyscraper, it is also the only city in the world with more than one completed building standing at 100+ stories. According to Wikipedia, it has the world's tallest skyline, based on the average height of its ten tallest completed buildings.

The problem with a skyscraper-centric city, at least for a tourist, is that the wait-to-payoff ratio is rather large, due to all the potential bottlenecks - at the Sears Tower, for instance, I stood in line about 45 minutes for the security checkpoint, then maybe half an hour to buy a ticket for the elevator, then half an hour for the informational movie about the tower, and then a final twenty minutes to actually get on the elevator. I was glad I rented the little audio tour doodad, since it let me maximize the amount of time I spent actually at the top of the tower - before waiting in line to go back down. But it was worth it; how else are you going to properly appreciate a town of skyscrapers than by seeing it from the top of the tallest one?

Going into it, I really didn't know what to expect from Chicago. I had heard a range of opinions on its balance of big-city and midwestern, and anticipated basically a core of the latter overlaid with a thin veneer of the former. The impression that I got from it, however, was strongly New Yorkish in flavor, but with more...let's see - character? Where New York is all rectilinear canyons of steel and glass, Chicago has the el

and King Lear,

and a river runs through it.

Oh, and the architecture of its financial district has New York's beat all hollow:

All right. More about Chicago coming up soon, hopefully tomorrow, hopefully after I have secured some gainful employment for the next few months. But look! I'm alive!