Today was a day of firsts for us in Chicago. We came out on ABC 7 live news for the first time, we also saw it snowing - or something close - for the first time in our trip, we got to see our first museums of Chicago, and we got to see Lake Michigan for the first time. Yes, we’ve been in Chicago for a few days with a view of Lake Michigan from our window but we’ve never gotten around to going down to see it till today.

Grace at the ABC7 studio

To check out the ABC article click here.

One good thing about the jetlag we still have, is that we sleep early and get up early almost every day now. This makes it easy for us to for example be at the ABC studio at 8am, or take a morning stroll down the loop on a Sunday morning. The loop is the business district in central Chicago, but I wouldn’t recommend taking an early stroll on the weekend. It is nearly deserted, and at times can be a bit creepy with shady characters walking around.

We had one such encounter with a shady character today, we were having a warm drink at a McDonald (the only thing we could find open) in the loop when someone came in asking everyone for money. After we got out to leave he followed us, and started shouting all kinds of obscenities in our direction. So we did what anyone sensible would, we avoided him completely and walked quickly in the opposite direction, ducking into the first shop that was open. It was a bit scary as here in the US you never know who might be carrying a gun, and if he was high - he seemed so by the way he was shouting - he might have used it for no good reason.

After that, we decided to leave the loop and head to the more crowded areas. We decided to see a few museums on the way, with most of them having free entrance at this time of year.

The “crowded” areas of Chicago on a Sunday morning

It then started snowing lightly - what they call “flurries” here - and we decided to walk through Millennium Park down to the lake. There we met the local population of gray squirrels that were busy prancing around looking for food. They seemed very used to humans as when we would put out our hands they would come close looking for food.

Watch the video above for more.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Front Page, Chicago, Press, Interesting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.