Chicago (Part Two)... March 30, 2008

The second day we were there Chris spent the whole morning and until 3:00 in interviews for the White House Fellowship.  He said they went pretty well and that he felt good about them.  I was just praying for him that his personality would come across because really, who could not love him?  I spent the morning having an expensive taxi fiasco and ending up at a really cool natural history museum.  (Let's just say, cabbis don't really care about you.  They just care that you can pay them - and no, they don't want to take the time to have you pay by credit card.)  But let's just focus on the cool museum part.

At the Field Museum they have the largest and most complete T-Rex ever found.  It's head alone was 5 feet long.  Reading that helped me put into perspective how big dinosaurs really were and made me realize why my 5 year old nephew Mason is obsessed with them.  I'm only 5'4".  I guess knowing that a huge, biting, fighting, extinct animal has a mouth the size of your Aunt that can crush practically anything does make T-Rexes seem pretty cool. 

I also saw an awesome exhibit there about ancient Egypt.  In the exhibit they had recreated an entire tomb, including all the exterior rooms, of a Pharoh and you could walk through it, and a whole bunch of the walls and the artifacts were authentic, and...it was just really cool.  I could feel my brain cells expanding.

At 2:30 I got back into a cab, declared it would be the last time I surrendered any of my money to a cabbie on our trip, and went back to our hotel to meet Chris.  Then Chris and I explored the city a little and found dinner at a famous Chicago restaurant called the "Italian Village" which is, surprisingly - ok not, named that because the inside looks like you are sitting outside in a quaint Italian village.  Kindof kitchy, but it was actually cute and the lasagna there was yummy.

The highlight of the whole trip for me came next when we went to see the Broadway musical Wicked.  

It was so awesome.  I cried at the end.  Not necessarily because of how it ended, although it was really great how it ended, but because it made me remember how when I was a teenager I wanted to be an actress on broadway like most boys want to play in the NFL or be a major league baseball player.  Those cast members were so good, and they were obviously living their dreams and loving every minute of it.  That's why I cried.  I loved the whole experience...By the way, Wicked is the story of how the witches in the Wizard of Oz became witches.

After the musical we walked back to our hotel and shared a whole container of Hagen-Daz.  Yum.

The next day, our last day, we spent the morning at an incredible art museum where we saw hugly famous works of art.  Being there in person to see those paintings that are so iconic was surreal, like the feeling I had when I saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time.  It was so fun!  My favorite was the painting "Inventions of Monsters" by Salvador Dali.  Poor guy.  If that's what it felt like to be inside his head I'm glad he's dead so he doesn't have to endure that anymore!  But it made for really interesting art I guess.

Then we had lunch, got our luggage, and went to the airport.  The end.  Oh, I sat next to a lady from Israel on the way back on the plane.  That was interesting.  She and her whole family were on their way to SLC for a family vacation.  Can you imagine flying all the way from Israel to SL just for vacation?  She said she found SL on the internet and thought it looked like fun.  She had a two year old on her lap, so seeing him made me really anxious to get back to my two year old.  She asked me a bunch of questions about Utah and mormons, and I asked her a bunch of questions about living in Israel.  She was so surprized to learn that we have a "dead sea", a river jordan, and that it emptied into a fresh water lake too.  I told her to take her son to the Children's Museum at the Gateway, the zoo, and of course Temple Square while the rest of her family skiied.  Hope they are having fun!