Start with Part 1, if you haven’t seen it already.

Chris and Veronica

Fri­day evening was Veronica’s per­for­mance at the gui­tar fes­ti­val. She and Chris, the gui­tarist from UW, played first on the festival’s open­ing con­cert. I glanced through the pro­gram book­let, and I’m pretty sure that Veron­ica was the only non-guitarist per­form­ing all week­end. The two of them did an excel­lent job — they played two move­ments of Mauro Giu­liani’s Grand Duo Con­cer­tant. I’m look­ing for­ward to hear­ing the whole piece on Chris’s recital in a cou­ple of weeks.

Sue the T-Rex

On Sat­ur­day, we got up rel­a­tively early and checked out of the hotel. We were able to leave our bags there while we headed off to the Field Museum. Our main objec­tive at the Field was to see their tem­po­rary Real Pirates exhibit. We arrived fairly early, so we were able to breeze right in to both the museum and the pirate exhibit. The exhibit fol­lows the his­tory of the Why­dah, a slave ship turned pirate ship. So, it starts out detail­ing the ship’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Atlantic slave trade of the early 18^th cen­tury, then picks up with the story of Sam Bel­lamy, the pirate cap­tain who cap­tured her in the Caribbean. The exhibit does a good job of explain­ing the var­i­ous sorts of lives at sea — those of a slave, a pirate, and a sailor in the King’s navy. The exhibit is pep­pered with arti­facts from the Why­dah — can­non, pis­tols, pieces of eight, etc. The ship sank off Cape Cod in a storm in 1717 and was found by a team led by Barry Clif­ford in 1984. Part­way through the exhibit, I was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed at the arti­fact to dio­rama ratio, but a whole sec­tion about the recov­ery of the ship and con­ser­va­tion of its arti­facts set that straight.

We vis­ited the Field a cou­ple of years ago, so many of the exhibits were fresh in our minds. We did go through the dinosaur hall again, though (I’ve always been a dinophile). We also spent some time in a cou­ple of small tem­po­rary exhibits, one fea­tur­ing ancient jew­elry from around the Mid­dle East, and another of pho­tographs of the mas­sive Hindu Kumbha Mela pil­grim­age. Sadly, we didn’t have the time or energy to see the other big tem­po­rary exhibit, The Aztec World.

A Col­or­ful Wall Across the Street From Our Hotel

We made some great food choices through­out our visit, thanks in no small part to the Yelp.com iPhone appli­ca­tion. Yelp lets you search for busi­nesses near your cur­rent loca­tion and pro­vides user-supplied rat­ings and reviews for them. Aside from the deep-dish pizza we had the first night, we had a deli­cious break­fast at the Bongo Room, great very fresh sushi at Oysy, and delec­table Cuban sand­wiches at Cafecito. We even found an impres­sively stocked inde­pen­dent liquor store where we were able to buy a bot­tle of Goats Do Roam red and a bar of Ghi­rardelli dark choco­late, thus bypass­ing the allure of our hotel room mini-bar.

The only snag in our trip came at the end. When we attempted to pur­chase our return trip Metra tick­ets at Union Sta­tion, the agent informed us that on the week­end, trains don’t go as far as the sta­tion where we’d parked the car. Whoops. We got on the train any­way, fig­ur­ing we’d find a cab to take us the rest of the way. But, we remem­bered that our friends Les­ley (of Le Tri­an­gle d’Or) and Keith were in Elgin that week­end vis­it­ing Keith’s fam­ily. They agreed to pick us up and ferry us to the other sta­tion. Even bet­ter than that, they invited us to stay for a deli­cious din­ner with Keith’s par­ents and sis­ter. So, what appeared to be a snag turned out to be serendipitous!

As usual, click any of the pho­tos above to see the whole gallery.

Museum of Sci­ence and Industry

Last week was our much-needed spring break. Veron­ica was slated to play at the Mid-America Gui­tar Ensem­ble Fes­ti­val (at Roo­sevelt Uni­ver­sity) with a gui­tarist from UW, so we used that as an excuse to spend a few days in Chicago. We landed a great hotel deal via Hotwire.com and stayed at the Chicago Hilton, which over­looks Grant Park and is walk­ing dis­tance from the Art Insti­tute of Chicago‎, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquar­ium, and lots of other cool stuff. The only down­side of our ritzy down­town digs was that park­ing was $43 bucks a night. So, we parked in Elgin (at a rate of $1.50/night) and took the Metra com­muter rail into town.

We rolled into town on Thurs­day after­noon, hoofed it from Union Sta­tion to our hotel, and set­tled in. For din­ner, we hit Lou Malnati’s — a local pizza chain. I have to say that I’ve never been a fan of Chicago-style deep-dish, but this place changed my mind. Our main event for the evening was going to a tap­ing of the NPR news quiz show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” We lis­ten to the show reli­giously, and had been talk­ing for awhile about see­ing it live. We showed up about twenty min­utes before the doors opened, and it was already packed. Luck­ily we’d already bought tick­ets, so we just joined the throng wait­ing to enter the auditorium.

The show itself was a blast! The pan­elists (for this show: Tom Bodett, Kyrie O’Connor, and Paul Provenza), host Peter Sagal, and score­keeper Carl Kas­sel came onstage to a dark­ened room, flash­ing lights, and the Chicago Bulls’ entrance music. Carl even ran out, wav­ing his arms and high-fiving the panel. The show itself took some­where between an hour and a half and two hours to record. Quite a bit gets cut before the show airs, but it was all funny. Per­haps the fun­ni­est moment was some­thing not writ­ten for laughs at all. The bulk of the show’s mate­r­ial was about the cur­rent eco­nomic cri­sis, with lots of talk about fail­ing banks and shady deals made by said banks. At the end of one of the show’s seg­ments, Peter started doing his lit­tle spiel about the show’s spon­sors — one of which is LendingTree.com. When he got to the line “When banks com­pete, you win,” every­one erupted in laugh­ter. He had to re-do that bit twice to get a laugh-free version.

U-505

We spent most of Fri­day at the Museum of Sci­ence and Indus­try, which occu­pies one of the only remain­ing build­ings from the 1893 World’s Columbian Expo­si­tion. The museum has lots of cool stuff, and strikes a pretty good bal­ance between activ­i­ties and exhibits for kids and things for adults. I spent a lot of time mar­veling at how they got var­i­ous things into the build­ing: the entire Pio­neer Zephyr stream­lined train, a Boe­ing 727, and a Ger­man sub­ma­rine U-505. I espe­cially enjoyed the Trans­porta­tion Gallery, the U-505, and the exhibit of Ships Through the Ages. The museum was packed with school groups, so we didn’t get to see every­thing we would have liked to. But, that means we should have plenty of things to see the next time we visit.

A Goose in a Tree!

After exit­ing the museum, we walked all the way around it to see the rest of the build­ing and to look at it across the rem­nants of the lagoon from the World’s Fair. The build­ing itself is quite cool, with lots of columns, stat­ues, pre-distressed friezes, and domes. See the gallery for more exte­rior shots and close-ups of some of the archi­tec­tural detail. As I was tak­ing pic­tures across the lagoon, Veron­ica pointed up at a tree — there was a large goose sit­ting in it! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a goose in a tree before, and one of its com­pan­ions walk­ing around on the ground seemed con­fused by it as well.

I’ll con­tinue the story soon. Mean­while, click any of the pho­tos above to view the rest of the pho­tos from our weekend.