THE WINDY CITY

Was in Chicago this past Friday-Saturday (not Thursday as I had originally planned). Same business: take my passport and work approval letter from the Osaka Naturalization bureau to the Japanese Consulate just off Michigan Avenue to get work visa stamped in it. Then, since I had already traveled nearly three hours up from Urbana to get there, I decided to spend a night and have the rest of the day to wander around Millennium Park (built in only 2004) before heading back to Urbana.

I found a hotel with a fantastic location: the River Hotel in a historic building on Wacker Drive on the south bank of the Chicago River. (It's the tall, skinny lit-up building third from the right in the picture.) Only $127 a night, quite reasonable for its location, I thought. It was within walking distance of Michigan Avenue and the big park at the Lake Front, where Millennium Park occupies the NW corner. Since my first room's thermostat didn't work, I was given a room with a river view on the 13th floor. Pretty much what you see in the picture is what I could see at night from my hotel window! It had a view of those two round apartment buildings that show up in the old Bob Newhart Show panorama of Chicago. (The edge of one of them is visible at the left of the photo.)

CONSULATE: A pretty slow day at the office. After going through a perfunctory metal detector machine search, I found only two or three other visitors in the office. The anglo man behind the glass window (hired to deal with the English-speaking public?) was polite, but told me I'd need a passport picture - which of course no one, not even the consulate website, had bothered to mention. Fortunately, a Walgreen's was right on the corner, so down I went again in the elevator and took care of that. Since I already had the correct documentation from my university, all I really needed was to fill out a form, hand them the form and passport, and fill out a Fedex mailing envelope to have them mail the passport back in.

Barely 40 minutes. That meant my city parking charge was "only" $18! I drove around the Lake front and park area before heading to my hotel. Once free of my bags, I could walk around the city and headed straight for Millennium Park. It's a very people-oriented, modernistic collection of things, including the video fountain by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa. The pictures on the two "monolith" like structures keep changing like a slide show. The entire sidewalk around them is flooded to wading depth, so, of course, it's an immediate draw for kids! When I walked past, there were three adult self-styled Greek "nymphs" cavorting in the water in their campy costumes.



The park also includes a large metallic "Bean" sculpture that mirrors the spectators in a a hall-of-mirrors-like way, a large "bowl" for orchestral concerts and a big lawn for the audience to set up chairs and picnic spreads on, and a kind of prairie garden with carefully arranged prairie plants.

From Millennium Park, I headed along the Chicago river in the exceptionally cool summer evening. After walking about an hour and half, I found myself at the entrance to Navy Pier, but feeling hungry, decided it was time to get serious about some dinner. I dreaded walking all the way back to the hotel, but discovered to my relief that water taxis left frequently from that location, and one of the stops was Michigan Avenue by the bridge. Perfect! So, I got a scenic little river tour back to the hotel for $3, and enjoyed a nice ravioli dinner at the Italian restaurant in the ground floor of my hotel. All in all, a great day!