My kind of town... Chicago

I promised I'd say more about Chi-town (is that as dorky and indicative of tourist status as people who call San Francisco "Frisco"?). First of all, I was really impressed with the architecture. I especially loved the Chicago Tribune building, which I made a point to touch all over.
Here's the top:
And here's one of the MANY bricks and building materials that are at street level:

I also liked the Wrigley building:


I also thought the public art was fantastic. Maybe I'm inured to our local public art or maybe there just isn't really as much cool stuff, but in one brief walk around the city, we saw this: (note the Adventures in Babysitting building in the background).

And this:

And this: (Yeah, it's a Picasso)

And this: (Yeah, it's a Miro.)

Also, there was almost no graffiti. I don't know what their graffiti abatement program must be like, but seriously, there was nothing! I was totally amazed. It wasn't even like there were those square painted-over patches. Just nothing. It was a very clean city, especially for such a big city.

There were panhandlers, as you'd expect, but in most cases, they were at least doing something -- playing a horn, singing "Roxanne"... It was kind of a nice change.

Okay, fine, I got startled by the robot guy! In S.F., we have robot guys and we have statue guys, but never the twain shall meet. So when what I thought was a statue guy (he hadn't moved the whole time we were approaching up the block) suddenly emitted robot sounds and moved, I jumped a little. So what. Screw you guys. And there is another difference about Chicago -- moving robot statue guys.

Chicago was enormous. The drive from downtown to the suburb, or the suburb to the airport, was 40 minutes or so! I'm sure part of it was that we were taking streets so we could see the sights, but I was still impressed at the size of the place.

I liked the weather. I don't think I'll ever quite get used to humidity, but it wasn't really uncomfortably hot. The evening we spent on the waterfront was perfect.

I thought it was pretty pedestrian-friendly. With the exception of one night that we got stuck under a bridge and had to cross six lanes of traffic and climb a flight of stairs to get to the real street, everything was easy to navigate. In several places, the sidewalk was extra-wide to accommodate foot traffic, especially near the river. Wacker Street was interesting: apparently there is a Wacker street that runs North-South, but it also turns and runs East-West, and there is an upper and lower Wacker Street, which you access via stairs. We had to go downstairs (though not on Wacker) to go to our Thai restaurant that night. It was quite different for me.

I suppose that's all, unless I think of more later. To follow is the pizza bill debacle.