Chicago, Day 1: Happy Friday!

There might be some confusion about whether I travel for something other than weird music or a decent plate of duck.  You know, something practical and/or geeky.  Like my job.

Well, here I am in Chicago on business.  (Gawd, that sounds so 1950's.  Where's my hat and briefcase?  And my martini?).    It's the first time I've been anywhere on business in 10 years.  The last was ApacheCon 2001 in Orlando, FL.   My wife Kathy got pretty ill after that point and it wasn't practical to attend conferences (she would need to go to a nursing home - the minimum stay was two weeks and really expensive).  But, it was tough.  The techie's life should have at least one conference a year, just to keep up with the fast paced world.

So here I am at SpringSource 2GX.  2000 attendees - about 4 times more than ApacheCon.  Lemme summarize it for the geek-allergic among you.  It was 3 days long, buzzword-compliant, and had too many guys and not enough women.  But I learned a lot - stuff with immediate benefits and interesting stuff with no immediate practical value. Conferences knock your brain out of its ruts.

Then it was Friday, the conference ended. At 3:00 Amy comes strolling into the Millenium Knickerbocker hotel in Chicago.  Finally the real work could begin!

Toddlin'

But lemme back up a bit. Chicago is a Toddlin' town so the song goes, and there are a few interpretations of what this means. It stumbles around like someone after a night of drinking (Chicago was not really big on prohibition, hence Sinatra calls it my kind of town.) It's a toddler compared to other cities, like says Memphis or Paris. Or toddlin' is just a nice alliterative word. But that sounds kind of like a dimunitive compliment, like "I can't say anything nice about Chicago, so it's toddlin'." They could at least say it has a nice personality.

But Chicago is my favorite large American city. It has been ever since I came up for air from Union Station in the Sept. 1990. It's fun, laid back, has an interesting mix of people, and a lot of variety. I set a lot short stories I wrote in Chicago after that. There are lots of stories here.

This time I arrived in Chicago O'Hare and got the skyline view. It's very different - pretty overwhelming. The downtown looks like The Adriondacks - it's like a wall of stuff that immediately becomes the foreground. And this time, I had a little knowledge of architecture. Just enough to make me dangerous.

I didn't get to see much Chicago at the conference itself. There were little reminders here and there - the water coolers made out of wood straight from Frank Llloyd Wright. Chicago hot dogs on the buffet. Of course you had to make one yourself, which requires an Internet-fueled knowledge of just what a Chicago hot dog "dragged through the garden" means:

• Poppy seed bun
• Hot dog (of course)
• Lettuce and tomato
• Celery Salt (I used too much)
• Mustard
• Hot thin peppers on top. Just two.

I think I approximated it pretty well. In general the conference food was really good, so I only ate out once ... at the Weber Grill. They make everything on literally a Weber Grill in this place. I had their legendary beer can chicken. It may not have been the most flavorful, but it definitely the tenderest, juiciest chicken I ever had. And their bourbon baked beans were pretty fantastic. I wanted to try dessert from the grill - apple pie baked in a bag is their speciality. But I was too full.

Keynote speakers went on until past my bedtime. But at night,on the 8 block walk back to my hotel, I could really see Chicago in it's finest. At night, it's a beautiful city. There's color everywhere. The John Hancock Building glows strangely, with it's two purple antennae scraping the sky like an ant. The Allerton Hotel sports the neon sign "Tip Top Tap". I find new, interesting things every time I travel down Michigan Ave.


And Chicago is Even Better...

... when your good woman gets there! At every meal, I had asked my compatriots (a new set every time - that's the way I do conferences) what I should do with my girl friend the weekend.  I got lots of suggestions from going shopping (not good) to a Bear's Game (really not good), but mostly they just told me what restaurants to do.  Which of course is the main thing.

Someone suggested, very strongly, to go to Erwin's.  It's a 3 mile walk, our of the touristy section, and the locals have just started to discover it.  Meaning - perfect!  After a few wrong turns courtesy of Google Maps (which works great as long as your GPS working - not a given with all the tall buildings in Chicago) we high-tailed it to Erwin's in the Lincoln Park district, past the zoo.

It was the first eye-closing mail we've had since Paris.  By eye-closing, I mean each bite is so good that you close your eyes to focus your whole brain on taste, feel, aroma.  Erwin's, it turns out, was a groundbreaking restaurant in the farm-to-table movement.  Get local, in-season ingredients and make something spectacular out of them.  Their menu, therefore, is very fluid.   It's quite French, actually.

Amy had duck comfit with basil sausage.  It wasn't like French duck - not as dense and beefy.  But it was so fresh that it blew most of the duck we've had out of the water.  It was every bit as good as Great Range duck.  I had risotto with a creamy tomato sauce, shrimp and calamari.  The calamari was fantastic, not a bit rubbery or tasteless, and reminded me of the best meal I had in Paris (Les Olividades).   Dessert for me was a lemon ice that was spectatcularly creamy without a bit of cream.  Amy had a piece of sour cherry pie with a scoop of fabulous pumpkin ice cream.

It's hard to describe just how much different totally fresh food tastes, but it's pretty spectacular. My grandparents had a farm and I remember the farm food tasting quite a bit different. Maybe too intense. But here it just tasted like "food on steroids" to use a phrase that, on hindsight, means the exact opposite of what I really mean. You get the idea.

Once we were done, we were a block away, and then it hit! Or rather it almost hit. I stepped off the curb and just about got run over by a bicycle. The rider yelled "Happy Friday!" What the? Then I looked left, and found ….

I had actually almost got run over by a thousand bikes! Literally! Bikes as far as you could see down Clark St. There was no room for cars - they took over the whole street. About half were dressed in Halloween costumes, and a lot of them just shouted Happy Friday to us. Seriously. There was about a 2 mile string of bicycles.

What we had witnessed, as I found out later, was Critical Mass. The last Friday of every month in Chicago, people gather on their bikes at one end of the Lincoln Park district and ride to Daley plaza. There's enough that need they need a police escort. It's kind of an organized movement (the idea started in San Francisco and spread to other cities),but mostly not.  There's no real purpose, no leader, no committee to make sure it comes off, and no real reason to do it except people just love to ride their bike with other people. It's a "take back the streets" movement, but there's no protest. People are not angry or demonstrative. They just want to wish you a happy Friday. And they do ... repeatedly!

In hindsight, the fact that we were about to cross Clark St at that particular moment in the month was pretty amazing! But I'm convinced that Amy and I just attract amazing things. We can't help it. 

After we got across Clark St. we hiked the three miles back downtown to the John Hancock Tower. We went up to the 94th floor for the best night view of the city. And yeah …. It was very spectacular indeed! As colorful and light as the city was from the ground, it was just as colorful from almost 1000 feet up. It felt a little unstable, but that was probably just my mind flipping around. (I'm not fond of heights).

Coming back to our hotel we saw All Saints Spitalfields, a fashion store on Michigan Ave. Which doesn't sound all that exciting except for their awesome display of sewing machines. Two display windows on either side had about 100 sewing machines, and above the door was an awesome array of about 200. A banner hung in back of them with designs shown on from a projector. The effect was awesome - a peculiar mix of very old technology (The Singer and Pfaff machines were circa 1920's and 30's) and very new.

As people passed us on Michigan Ave., we just stared up at the display. It was a fitting way to end the day.