IL Day 5- Science, Submarines, and Sensational Snacking
I started today by getting some coffee at La Colombe Coffee Roasters. I thought it was a local spot, but I guess they’re actually a chain that started in Philadelphia before getting some big investments to expand nationally. While I tried to prioritize local businesses on this trip, I have to say the coffee was pretty good and I was able to get a gigantic coconut macaroon so I was still pretty happy with the start to my day.
After coffee and coconuts, my first stop for the day was the Hyde Park neighborhood and the scenic UChicago campus. Unfortunately, despite the beautiful weather and scenery, I lost all my photos from this morning one cell phone ago (the problem with taking 5 years to get around to writing this) and didn’t have any backups like I did for most everything else. Luckily, the big ticket sights are pretty well documented elsewhere on the internet.
First up was a bit of public art in the form of Lorado Taft’s monumental concrete sculpture The Fountain of Time. The sculpture is located in Washington Park and depicts 100 figures representing the span of the human lifetime being observed by a spooky robed Father Time. It makes for a weird mix of grand yet foreboding, an impressive display of all that humanity can be but a chilling reminder that it all ends. It’s pretty existential for park adornment but I really liked how bizarre it was.
After the sculpture, I intended to keep the art train a-rolling with a visit The Renaissance Society, an avant-garde art museum on UChicago’s campus that also happens to be one of the first museums in the country to focus entirely on modern and contemporary art. Unfortunately, it was between exhibitions when I was trying to visit so there was not much to see, but honestly even stumbling into the sleek modern gallery space hidden within an old Chicago brownstone was treat enough.
With art being a bust, I turned to science and made my way down to the Museum of Science and Industry. I had originally planned on this being a double feature with the Field Museum of Natural History, but it turns out that Chicago takes its science and industry seriously and they have one of the largest science museums in the world clocking in at over 400,000 sq. feet! So this sort of became the rest of my day, but I didn’t mind since it was a pretty darn cool museum. The museum impressed right away with its dramatic classical exterior that once was home to the Palace of Fine Arts at the World’s Columbian Expo (aka the Chicago World’s Fair).
taken from the internet because my crummy photography couldn’t capture the whole thing
After wowing with the impressive exteriors, the museum lobby really went straight for my heart with a giant Rube Goldberg machine contraption oddly intended to promote tourism in Switzerland. I’m not sure how or why it ended up in Chicago, but it tickled my childlike wonder like the beginning of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
But you’ve really got to see in motion to appreciate it:
After exploring all the wonders Switzerland has to offer, I started walking into the main galleries. First up was a series of dioramas intended to win over younger visitors and promote scientific curiosity and attention to detail with little games of I-Spy.
In my experience, science museums in general are geared more towards kids than adults, which certainly is not a knock since Boston’s Museum of Science was a big place in my own childhood, so even when a gallery like this isn’t really meant for me it’s sweet to think of what it must inspire in its key demographic.
Plus, while the I Spy game wasn’t much of a challenge for grown-ups, I was still taken in by just how downright bizarre the displays got ranging from penguin soirees to dentist offices to old-timey kitchens with unexpected visitors in the produce.
On diorama was intended as a sort of Chicago Greatest Hits and I was happy to see that these included an almost alarmingly puffy deep dish pizza and the phantoms of the Blues Brothers.
After the Eye Spy games, I made my way to the first of the big ticket museum exhibits, and the one that first put the museum on my radar: a fully restored German WWII U-Boat. The U505 is one of only six U-boats captured by the Allies and the only one to remain in the United States. The thing that strikes you right away is just how massively huge the sub is, clocking in at over 250 ft. long. It’s insane that something that impossibly large could also be stealthy, but it’s a testament to German engineering (even when it was in the service of war crimes) that this behemoth could submerge itself to depths of over 700 feet and travel at around 10 mph completely submerged and over 20 when it was surface making it surprisingly maneuverable and crafty. Hence why so few were captured, and why it was such a big deal for the Allies when they did get one. They frankly had no idea how the Germans had built things like this, and, until they could take one apart and study it, the U-boats were a nearly unmatched nautical terror.
As visitors walked around the sub, the exhibit relayed the story of how the U505 was captured and ultimately ended up in Chicago. The Allied forces had intercepted and decoded encrypted messages that implied a U-boat would be somewhere near Cape Verde but they didn’t have an exact location so they sent a task force consisting of an aircraft carrier named Guadalcanal and five supporting vessels named Pillsbury, Pope, Flaherty, Chatelain, and Jenks which are just wildly cartoony names for warships. The task force patrolled the seas near the northeast coast of Africa until finally, they pinged U505 with sonar just 800 yards away from their ship Chatelain. The aircraft carrier sent out two planes to help the fight while the other ships raced over as fast as they could. Chatelain was so close to the U-boat that it couldn’t drop depth charges fast enough to catch the submerged warship. They fired mortars while they tried to get ahead of them. While the ship and sub raced, the planes marked its location with gunfire. Eventually, Chatelain got far enough ahead to drop depth charges and they got a hit. The U-boat surfaced and the Allies opened fire. The Germans abandoned ship thinking the U505 was done for, but their attempts to sink it before it could fall into Allied hands were unsuccessful, and it’s suspected that this is likely thanks to some intentional sabotage by a crewman named Ewald Felix, who was half-Polish and seized the opportunity to get back at the Nazis and score himself some preferential treatment should he be captured.
Impressively, there was only one casualty during the whole ordeal. The U-boat crew was taken under utmost secrecy to a POW camp in Louisiana where they were kept separate from other prisoners and denied access to the Red Cross. Against the Geneva Convention, they were not allowed to contact their families and they were all falsely declared dead until after the war. The commitment to secrecy extended to painting the U-boat to resemble a US sub and towing all the way across the Atlantic to Bermuda so that its contents could be examined without fear of German spies learning that the secrets of their technology had fallen into Allied hands.
After reading about the dramatic battle and capture, it was time to go inside the sub itself which was pretty darn exciting (though I couldn’t take any photos). Most of the U-boat’s valuable interior had been removed long before it became an exhibit, but it had all been refurbished by the museum to still look pretty striking and make an impression. The thing that you can’t help but notice first is just how cramped the submarine is, and, while I’m not inclined to be too sympathetic to Nazis, on a human level it seemed like a kind of hellish experience being in there for long stretches. The craziest fact I learned was that to maximize storage for food and water they filled one of the sub’s bathrooms so the 57 men onboard had to eat and drink their way into having more than one restroom for the whole ship. It sounds like a nightmare. To make things a little more bearable, the U-boat was found with 85 records inside, and, in a neat bit of curation, the museum played songs from those albums while visitors toured the decks.
After exploring the ocean’s depths, the next exhibition went in the opposite direction with a look at things in outer space. The museum’s Henry Crown Space Center takes visitors through the fierce competition of the Space Race and the evolution of the United States space program. The big highlights the museum secured were the actual Apollo 8 spacecraft, the first US craft to orbit the moon, and the Mercury-Atlas 7, which completed three orbits around the Earth in 1962 (top left and right respectively).
All the technological aspects of getting to space were fascinating, but personally, I was more drawn to the human aspects. So naturally my favorite parts of the exhibit were about all the very practical and occasionally very gross thought that went into making sure astronauts would be able to eat and go to the bathroom in zero gravity. It’s fun to think that the Space Race is one of the only times in US history that figuring out what to do with a turd became both a matter of national security and life or death, but hey NASA stuck it out.
One of my favorite photos upon revisiting the one I’d taken at the museum included one from this gallery that showed a model rocket ship next to a baby carriage for scale.
After coming back down to Earth, I decided to pick up a tasty treat in an old-timey shop in the museum entitled Finnigan’s Ice Cream Parlor. Sadly the parlor is no longer a part of the museum, and that’s a real shame because the retro ambiance was thoroughly charming and they really made a mean mid-west milkshake (say that three times fast). I went with the oreo shake, and it was pretty spectacular.
After my milkshake, I made my back to the science exhibits. Next up was a classic science museum staple exhibition focusing on the natural phenomena that make up the natural forces involved in weather. While similar galleries exist in other museums, the Museum of Science and Industry takes everything to another level with bigger and crazier exhibits. Highlights for me included: a 40-foot-tall water vapor tornado; 30-foot-tall rainbows projected through 4 large prisms; a 20-foot Tesla Coil producing cracking electricity; and some flame retardant suits that looked like what people in the 50s thought Spacemen would wear.
The larger more, interactive highlights were complimented by various gadgets and gizmos that have been used to study and measure weather and atmospheric phenomena throughout history.
One of the most fun parts of this exhibit, ostensibly there to demonstrate the underlying physics governing the natural world but really there mostly for the fun of it, was a massive version of a Newton’s Cradle (most commonly seen as a desk toy) where each metal sphere was 9 inches in diameter and visitors could set them in motion.
Next up was a room filled with different patent models for different kinds of pumping engines. I’ll be honest I don’t remember the scientific significance of the different models, but as little pieces of sculptural art I think they all looked pretty neat (which is probably not the same criteria engineers have to use).
Next up was a really fun exhibit (sadly closed now) that I probably would have been obsessed with if I had visited as a kid in my prime science-museum visiting phase. Entitled the ToyMaker 3000, the exhibit showcased the entire automated manufacturing process for making little toy tops that visitors could purchase and customize. There’s something really satisfying about watching a (literal) well-oiled machine in action and the whole process of the toy assembly can be viewed through big glass windows, and the fact that technology is good enough that it’s all done entirely by robots is both a little spooky and really cool to see. In a charming touch to keep the little ones entertained during more tedious parts of assembly some of the robotic arms exist only to do little dances and draw faces, which honesty should be incorporated as official positions in human-run factories as well. Good for morale.
The actual tops were normal-toy sized, but outside the exhibit they had a giant glowing sculpture of them blown up to enormous proportions for a little extra wow factor.
Next up was a fun exhibit entitled Yesterday’s Main Street. The exhibit offers visitors a blast from the past by faithfully recreating a cobblestone Chicago street from 1910. The street contains mock-ups of several actual businesses that were operating in the city at the time, including my personal favorite a Nickelodeon theater playing old silent movies for visitors to take in. It wasn’t the most science-y of the museum’s offerings but it was utterly charming and a sweet love letter to the city around the museum.
After the trip to 1910, the next stop was the Transportation Gallery which featured various vehicles of technological significance. I’ve never been a particular buff about cars or other transportation (even though after this year in particular I spent a lot of time with them) but I really liked how this gallery found fun intersections of history, science, and technology. Highlights for me included: The Maize and Blue, a sleek, futuristic solar-powered race car that was actually made by the University of Michigan in 1993 for early races to demonstrate the capacity of solar energy (the unusual design was because the races stipulated that vehicles could only use what power was generated by their solar cells so given 1993 solar tech that meant thinking up more aerodynamic car designs to maximize speed); the 999 steam locomotive (did I mention this building is huge?) that for a time was the fastest land-vehicle in the world and is thought to be the first vehicle in the world to exceed speeds of 100mph ( though it is possible that this was just good marketing as some modern engineers believe that it is fairly unlikely that 999 could have gotten quite so fast); and the Piccard Gondola, a specially designed hot air balloon that, during the 1933 World’s Fair, broke the world altitude record and became the first vessel to carry humans into the stratosphere.
Perhaps the grandest piece in the Transportation Gallery was entitled the Great Train Story, and it featured a sprawling 3500 square foot model railroad set that faithfully recreates the rail line from Chicago to Seattle. Whether you’re a big train guy or not, it’s hard not to be taken in by both the enormity of the whole piece and also the minuteness of all the little details. The railroad doesn’t have every single stop between the two destinations because that would be bananas, but the cityscapes that are recreated are astounding in how they seem to capture the bustle of everyday life, and there are lots of little silly scenes and easter eggs to encourage visitors to take a closer look. For those who are all about the train aspect of the whole piece, visitors are also able to interact and direct the trains with various buttons that may open drawbridges, reroute tracks, or even activate tunnels.
To really see it in motion, the museum helpfully made a video for the model railroad’s 10th anniversary where they put a camera on one of the trains and it’s pretty mesmerizing honestly:
Last but not least, leaving the Transportation Gallery I passed by this funky little train called the Stephenson’s Rocket which was built in 1829 and marked an important evolution in locomotive designs even if it looks a bit cartoon-y now. Apparently it was the first vehicle to surpass speeds of 25 mph, and it’s funny to think at the time that must have been crazy fast enough to garner the name “Rocket”. I also read that on the first day it was actually used by a railroad company it struck and killed a member of Parliament who was apparently notoriously clumsy. The whole event while tragic also reads like a slap-stick silent movie, as William Huskisson (soon to be deceased) saw the train coming but couldn’t make up his mind in which direction to run away from the train so he ran back and forth a few time before jumping. on the back of another train. Unfortunately its doors had already been shut and when they opened them to let him in he swung from the door directly into the oncoming Rocket. The rocket hit the door and Huskisson fell off directly onto the tracks and was run over. You can’t make stuff like that up, and it’s a testament to how good the design of the Rocket was that they kept using it even after all that. I also feel that it’s no surprise that both Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle then went on to use a replicas of the Rocket in their short films because it feels like that was just the train’s destiny.
The next exhibit pivoted away from engineering towards natural science with a focus on genetics. The exhibit illustrated the way small changes in DNA could have large effects on organisms, with dozens of genetically modified mice, chicks, and frogs. Watching baby chicks actually hatch, it’s hard not to feel a little bit of awe in the natural world, even as the exhibit urges you to wonder if humans are perhaps meddling too much with it by raising questions about the ethics of genetic modification.
Next up was a special temporary exhibit entitled Fast Forward...Inventing The Future, which focused on 12 contemporary scientists working on the cutting edge of their respective fields ranging from more creative fields like music and computer animation to the realms of hard sciences like robotics and medicine. One thing I really appreciated about the gallery was that the 12 featured scientists represented a diverse cross-section of humanity combating the mental image we often have of scientists being old white dudes in lab coats. Old white dudes in lab coats still have plenty to offer, but science is for everyone and we all benefit from more kinds of brains tackling the complexities of understanding the universe.
Some highlights for me included: seeing an actual Mars Rover designed by Ayanna Howard and learning that the man who invented the Super Soaker squirt gun (a staple of late 90s/early 2000s Saturday morning cartoon commercials) also happens to be an actual rocket scientist named Lonnie Johnson who is currently designing solid state batteries to improve the safety and efficiency of the batteries used in electronics and aerospace.
The centerpiece of the gallery was a massive eye-catching and thought-provoking model of Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist and medical ecologist’s, concept of a vertical farming unit intended to help boost the amount of fresh food in increasingly urban population centers while also reducing the encroachment on natural resources necessitated by our current farming systems. The model offers a more whimsical and futuristic aesthetic of what in reality would probably make use of pre-existing skyscrapers and abandoned urban buildings, but it effectively gets visitors to see something as familiar as an office building in a totally new light. Sometimes groundbreaking ideas aren’t so much rooted in completely new inventions but but merely seeing the world we already have in new and creative ways.
Next up was the Space Port, a small gallery above the larger Henry Crown Space Center that served as little timeline of America’s historical and pop-cultural fascination with the great cosmic expanse. Highlights for me included costumes from Star Trek and dazzling photographs of swirling nebulas.
Next up was a small gallery called Out of The Vault which featured a smattering of objects from the museum’s permanent collection highlighting the wonder to be found in the everyday and the changes in both design and technology over the past century.
Walking to the next gallery, I had to stop for moment to look up and take in the beauty of the museum’s 120 foot wide copper rotunda. With carefully designed color-changing lights, the impressive dome can conjure up different moods and I found this gentle blue gave the feeling of a calm night’s sky (even if it was only early afternoon). It was sort of like a more serene and artistic version of how casinos try to prevent you from realizing just how much time you’ve spent in there.
Next up, I passed by what was actually the museum’s very first exhibit a “working” coal mine that takes visitors underground (very literally) to explore the realities of procuring some of the raw materials necessary for producing the energy we use everyday. The exhibit consists of a 30 minute train ride around the coal mines under the museum (not sure if they ever actually had coal or if they’re just really convincing recreations, but it was an additional fee on top of museum admission which was unfortunately not really in my budget, especially after having to replace some of the items that had been stolen when my car was broken into. Still it was a cool concept and another reminder of just how absolutely massive the museum was.
Next up was a fun exhibit for the math nerds (aka my mother, sister, and I who always found ourselves spending the majority of any visit to the Museum of Science Boston in the mathematics room) entitled Numbers in Nature. The exhibit began with a short film and some interactive stations highlighting the repeating mathematical patterns that constantly appear in both the natural and man-made worlds even if we don’t always consciously notice them. There’s something beautiful and elegant about there being an underlying structure in a world that often feels chaotic to the naked eye. I think even people who don’t care much for math would find their jaw starting to drop watching the video and seeing just how often certain patterns re-occur.
The centerpiece of the exhibit was a Mirror Maze that took a simple pattern and used mirrors to turn it into a dizzyingly (and dazzlingly) tricky to navigate little maze filled with dead ends and false paths. Apparently, upon reading about the exhibit online there are also hidden rooms that you can into if you take certain paths and solve certain puzzles so as much as I enjoyed the maze I now feel like I gotta go back and try to see what I missed.
Lastly (for the math exhibit, there’s still a lot more science museum to get through) there was some very cool art made by Erik and Martin Demaine, a father-son duo of mathematicians and artists (Erik was apparently the youngest ever professor at MIT at the age of 20!) who have rigorously studied the possibilities of origami and make absolutely mind-boggling sculptures like the one below through nothing but careful paper manipulation.
Up next was an exhibit entitled Extreme Ice which focused on the majesty of our planet’s remaining glaciers (positively massive walls of ice) and the tragedy of how visibly diminished they’ve become due to climate change. The glaciers’ slow creep into non-existence is beautifully and devastatingly captured by James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey team, who travel to remote and difficult terrains to take vivid time-lapse photos and videos of ice in action. The photos are truly jaw-dropping even if the content paints a fairly harrowing portrait of our current climate crisis. To help visitors make a more intimate connection with our diminishing ice floes the exhibit also featured an actual 7-foot tall block of ice with little carved hand prints for guests to feel and engage with.
In a bit of a tonal pivot, up was a much more light-hearted exhibit entitled The Art of the Bicycle. The exhibit traced over 200 years (the oldest bike was from 1818!) of bike design and evolving technology. Even if you had no particular prior interest in bicycles, each piece offered a cool little snapshot into the time and aesthetic preferences of when it was made. Designs ranged from sleek and futuristic to almost improbably uncomfortable looking. While some of the more modern bikes also looked kind of crazy, the older models definitely had a higher degree of eliciting “How the hell did they think this would work?” responses. The only disappointment really was that they didn’t have a version of Pee-Wee’s bike from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure since that’s obviously the coolest bike around, but they did have an actual penny-farthing which was pretty nifty to see in real life.
Another highlight of this exhibit was the wall of bicycle seats which was comprised of all real historic seats but felt almost like a contemporary art installation. There was something pretty captivating but also oddly unnerving looking at all the different seats and it does really make you appreciate that basically in all of human history we’ve never really cracked making one of these that actually looks comfortable to sit on.
After the bicycles, it was on to an exhibit about race cars. I’ll be honest at this point, a few hours into the museum and having already seen a good number of cool cars in the main transportation gallery, I was a little burnt out on these horseless carriages. Still, if you were a car buff, I’m sure it was filled with rare gems of automobile-craft, and the fact that all of these vehicles were at some point being built for speed added a fun historical wrinkle because the idea of some of those rickety older machines hitting high speeds is downright cartoonish.
I mean the idea of anyone racing in something like this (with actual fire in the head lamps naturally) is just bananas.
While previous exhibits focused on transportation of the land and sky, the next gallery took to the seas with a focus on nautical history told through over 50 rigorously detailed model ships. The model ships covered a wide range of historical periods going as far back as the Ancient Phoenicians, and each model showed off the distinct regional designs and aesthetics of the culture from which the ship originated. I wasn’t absorbing much of the actual history at this point in my museum-ing, but the insane attention to every minuscule detail in each model was pretty astonishing even to a landlubber like me.
While each model captured the micro-details of a sea-faring life, the centerpiece of the gallery was a macro-scale model of a ship’s deck where visitors could play out living and working on the bubbling blue, learning about different navigational tools and necessary tasks aboard large maritime vessels.
The next exhibit departed from the realm of pure reality by offering visitors a chance to look at an exquisite miniature fairy castle once owned by silent film actress and doll-house aficionado Colleen Moore. You might think the doll house’s fantastical residents would preclude it from being displayed in a museum of science, but Colleen spared no expense on craftsmanship and the piece is a marvel in the mathematical art of scaling. While no fairies are present (Colleen wanted to encourage children seeing the doll house to use their imagination), every room feels like it is lived in and each piece of furniture, art, and architecture is meticulously rendered in miniature to appear exactly as it might if it were full sized. Best of all, the story behind the doll house is not one of some famous lady frivolously commissioning artists to realize her flight of fancy but something much more heartwarming. Moore imagined the doll house to be almost like a miniature museum in its own right and, during the Great Depression, she turned it into a traveling novelty exhibit to provide visitors with some much needed escapism and raise money for children’s charities. The tour proved successful, ultimately raised over $650,000 I should think went a long way in brightening up an otherwise decidedly dark chapter in this country’s history.
My favorite part of the dollhouse (other than its noble backstory) was all the miniature art including ornate tapestries, stained glass windows, paintings and sculptures, that would have dazzled at any size. I just think it must be a strange feeling to be artist finally getting a wealth patron only to then have to make all you art teeny tiny, but damned if all the artists involved didn’t step up to the task.
Last but not least, after spending most of the day in the gigantic museum, was an exhibit entitled Farm Tech. The exhibit honored the more rural parts of the Windy City’s home state where agriculture is still a primary industry. Within Farm Tech, visitors can see the latest in farming technology including a GPS guided harvester combine, and engage with interactive elements such as cow milking station where you can see one young visitor in my photo really look like he’s up to no good and trying not to get caught.
Naturally my favorite part of the exhibit was that it featured a giant statue of cow shit seemingly engulfing one of the pillars in the room. While the image is disgusting (though oddly charming that museum chose to showcase it in such a way, since most museums don’t pretend that there are big steaming turds lying around), poop is a big part of life on farms and can constitute quite a dilemma when it accumulates. The fact that one solution scientists have come up with for disposing of accumulating biowaste is to use poo to generate electricity (by turning the poo into natural gas) was genuinely fascinating so I guess perhaps some turds can in fact be polished.
After a full day’s worth of science and industry, I was in pretty desperate need for a coffee so I made my way to the cozy Ipsento Coffee. Ipsento had a warm, welcoming atmosphere and good strong coffee which was perfect for an afternoon pick-me-up. I also picked up a very tasty glazed donut, and while the end of the day selection might not make for the most aesthetic photo the fact that there were so few left at this point is a testament to how dang good they were.
Refueled, I made my way to the night’s open mic at a spot called Gallery Cabaret that struck the perfect balance between divey and artsy. On the divey side, they had great beers for low prices and on the artsy side, they had a solid stage set-up meant to accommodate jazz and punk bands as easily as comedy. I was there a little early so I helped myself to a delicious dark beer called the Magnetron Schwarzbier from Metropolitan Brewing, a Chicago brewhouse specializing in German-style beers. It had the rich flavor of a stout or porter but a lighter body closer to a lager that made it almost too easy to drink.
While I’m sure the good beer helped, the mic ended up being a really fun one. They had a neat setup where the two hosts stayed on stage the whole time and could riff with the comics. This could probably go wrong if the hosts were combative or constantly riffing, but the two comics (Keith Hazel and unfortunately I didn’t get the co-host’s name) were super jovial and only added energy to the room and helped lift each performer’s act.
My favorite comic of the night was a guy named Sean Schellhammer, who had some really great material about being on the autism spectrum. My favorite joke of his was, “I was talking to a girl and told her I had mild Aspergers and she said, ‘I can't go home with you because I was also diagnosed with that.’ I said “wat are you afraid of? we'll make a kid who likes trains too much?”
Other Highlights:
Sam Pricken- there are no moderate conspiracy theorists like sure Jews are lizard people but who am I to judge
Jason Melton - my girlfriend broke up with me in the gayest way possible. She slept with another woman
My own set was solid, and I was able to get the hosts to laugh which was a nice confidence boost after not doing so well the night before.
After the mic, I continued my pursuit of the finest Chicago deep dish pizza (spoiler alert, I like them all!). Tonight’s contender was the charmingly unassuming My Pi, which is often ranked among the city’s finest pizza purveyors but looks like just a regular no-frills corner store. They even share their space with a sandwich shop called Li’l Guys (adorable) which adds to the low-key-ness. But when it comes to the pizza they don’t mess around. Served in the pan, their deep dish has lovely crispiness on the crust, a thick layer of rich, creamy midwestern cheese, and is topped with a thick, chunky, and particularly flavorful red sauce. I was in heaven.
After the pizza, it still wasn’t particularly late so my friend Graham (who was hosting me) suggested that if I hadn’t been yet I should check out the Bahá’í House of Worship in nearby Wilmette as it is the only Bahá’í temple in the entire country and it’s a bit of an architectural marvel. I’m sad to say that, as a pretty secular boy, the temple wasn’t on my radar at all and I would have really missed out because it is truly jaw-droppingly beautiful. The temple is made out a concrete mixture that features two types of quartz giving it a warmer, stonier whiteness than your more industrial concrete. It almost creates the illusion that whole building was carved from a single block of marble. The number nine is considered a symbol of perfection in the Bahá’í faith, so it reappears throughout the temple and the grounds including nine entrances, nine interior arches, nine sections to the main dome, and nine gardens and fountains around the central temple. Because the Bahá’í believe in a unity amongst all world religions, the intricate patterns carved throughout the building feature motifs of recurring religious iconography from Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, and I liked the idea of the ornate building celebrating a little bit of everyone instead of touting its own faith’s superiority. It made for a nice note to end the day on, feeling a little bit of spiritual connection to the rest of the world.
My own photos got lost when the cell phone from this trip died (I backed up a lot but not everything unfortunately), but it might have honestly been for the best in this case because I took my photos at night and there’s a good chance I wasn’t supposed to be taking photos inside in the first place. Fortunately the internet can provide much higher quality photos than I would have been able to provide that can give you a sense of just how spectacular the House of Worhsip is.
Favorite Random Sightings: a t-shirt store called Strange Cargo; Big Wang's Chinese Street Food; and a pet store with the fascinating name Jameson Loves Danger
Regional Observation: I suppose people from Boston shouldn’t cast stones (and I do really love Chicago) but I think Hyde Park today is the farthest south I traveled this whole week so in that way the city can feel super segregated and the South Side is almost an entirely different city than the touristy (Whiter) north side. I went back a few years later for a friend’s wedding, and I stayed at an air bnb in the South Side and Uber drivers were genuinely scared to take me there even though it seemed to me a pretty innocuous residential part of the area. I know that crime and violence are real in lots of parts of the country, but in my own experience it feels like a lot of “bad parts of town” are kind of kept that way by people outside of those areas just ignoring them or being to scared to see anything else there. When you have the luxury to be able to do so, it’s really easy to ignore a lot, and I guess I just wanted to acknowledge that as much as I loved and saw in Chicago I didn’t even see some people’s Chicago at all.
Random Joke of the Day: A guys’s car broke down. He pulled over to the side of the road. Luckily there was a farm near by, so he asked the farmer if he could help. The farmer said, "Sure just let me get my horse, Bruce.” So they hooked the car up.
The farmer called out to his horse “Giddyup, Sonya!”. The horse didn’t move. “Giddyup,Tonya!” The horse didn’tt move. “Giddyup Bruce!” The horse moved.
When they got back, they fixed the mans car. The man said thank you and then asked the farmer why he called different names."
“Well" the farmer started, "Bruce won't do anything if he knows he's the only one doing it."
Song of the Day: