Monday, January 21, 2008

Chicago trip - Jan 2008

Last Friday, we drove to Chicago, together with three other Singaporean friends. Despite being told that the weather will be a bitter cold of -20C (colder if you add in the wind chill), we still went ahead with our plans. The lure of the Dim Sum from Phoenix Restauant at Chinatown was just too much to resist!

Shisheng drove, with the help of our GPS. Very useful. The journey there went without a hitch, and we were sitting in Phoenix at 10.30am, Chicago time.

We ordered lots of food! Har gaos and siew mais were a must. Plus, there was tau huay! (One of our friends absent-mindedly told the waitress we wanted "tau-huay", getting a quizzical look from the waitress. Hehe... I guess the restaurant felt too much like home.)

After a wonderful Dim Sum brunch, and burning a slight hole in our pocket (but it was worth it!), we proceeded to the Field Museum.

The Field Museum is, without a doubt, one of the best Museums I have ever been to! They have so many exhibitions: Ancient Americas, Eskimos, Bugs, Plants, Birds... and most importantly, Dinosaurs!!!

This is the star of the Field Museum. Meet Sue, the world's largest and most complete T-Rex!

(Fun fact: "Sue" is named so after the paleontologist (Sue Hendrickson) who found her. Sue's gender is not known...)

The Museum even offers a sleepover with Sue. Sounds fun!

Besides Sue, there were other dinosaur exhibits too. There was even a Fossil's Preparation Laboratory where we can see paleontologist work with fossils!

We bought tickets to only the permanant exhibitions. There were two Specially-Ticketed Exhibitions going on, one on Maps, and the other on Bugs. We were glad we decided not to buy tickets to the extra exhibitions, coz we could not even finish the permanent ones! And we were there for half a day! To think that we were even thinking of going to the other two attractions near the Field Museum -- Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium...

But, we will be back!!! Next time, we will spend more time with the dinosaurs, and less time with the birds and Eskimos...

Nightfall in Chicago. In the foreground is Lake Michigan.

For dinner, we went back to Chinatown to eat "Chinese BBQ", better known to us as char siew, roast duck, roast pork etc... Yummy! I miss roast duck... I was thinking of duck so much that the ducks I saw at the museum were transforming into roast ducks in my mind...

After dinner, we went to Aji-Ichiban. One of our friends saw mango-flavoured Hi-Chew, and bought ten eight sticks of them! We tried one: it was really good! Another friend bought the White Rabbit sweet. And we were surprised to see that the White Rabbit sweet came in Red Bean flavour too! Seems strange, so we didn't buy it.

After shopping in Aji-Ichiban, we headed home. It was too cold to roam around elsewhere. We had to literally run back to the parking lot and into our car, or else our ears and nose will fall off. Chicago is not called The Windy City for nothing.

The ride home was smooth, except that the GPS gave us direction to drive through a small and infamous town by the name of Gary, once known as "The Murder Capital of the World". Creepy drive. Fortunately, nothing out of the ordinary happened, and we all reached home safe and sound.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

sounds like adventure and good food all packed into one. great weekend!