2018 Summer Road Trip – Chicago Tourist Day

Today we visited the Chicago Art Institute bringing our museum streak to three. The Art Institute has an exceptional collection and impressive temporary collections. I said hello to my friends in the Thorn miniature gallery and then looked over the American work from 1800 to 1975 or so. This was the third museum with a large American wing that I had seen in five days or so and trends and themes previous invisible popped out. Names and movements were less alien. I wonder if the same thing would have occurred if I had visited the same museum three times instead.

I visited my friend “Time Transfixed” as its commonly translated. Magritte prefers “ongoing time stabbed by a dagger” but there were fights that lost.

After museum time, we quickly got dinner at what I can only call an Asian Diner. The menu was thick, much thicker than I’ve ever seen for a place like that and one set of pages was just options for smoothies with about 120 on the spread. We wound up mixing Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese food and everything was a solid B. The servers were even diner surly which made me feel at home.

That evening we took an architecture boat tour of Chicago. Over the span of about two hours we covered the portion of the Chicago River from the Post Office to Lake Michigan. This was the first time I’d seen the Chicago river walk which seemed like a pretty big oversight having visited some dozen times. It was pretty but the buildings started to blur after a bit. There were a large number of boat goers taking pictures of themselves giving Trump Tower the finger.

After the tour finished we decided to half walk back to our hosts. We walked to the edge of the loop and then took a Lyft back. I talked with our hosts for a bit before calling it a night. We slept in.

This post was made on 2018-07-27 and is backdated.