Chicago

We landed in Chicago on 19 June 2007 and thankfully for us, A's friends offered to let us stay with them. They're one of the nicest gay couple you'd find around and we had a grand time hanging out with them (As an aside, they've been together for a decade now and in gay years, that equals 100 years.)


So where do I begin talking about Chicago without boring everyone to death? Trips are like that. Most times, people don't really want to hear every single freakin' detail about it, no matter how much it might have meant to you at that point. I'll try to keep it succinct. Then again, I guess you don't have to read on if you don't want to.


A and I started the week trying to do the famous Loop sculpture tour. Chicago has all these really famous sculptures in and around their downtown area and we figured since they all looked so close together on the map, we'd skip one of those walking tours and save ourselves a few bucks. Have I mentioned A and I have really poor directional skills? Well, we do. As you might imagine, the sculpture tour turned into a sculpture hunt. For instance, we were standing along the street trying to look for this huge Picasso sculpture (yes we had pictures of them so we did know what we were looking for) when we saw this really nice fountain across the street and decided to walk over and rest for a bit. As we were sitting there, we kept looking around for that Picasso sculpture. It had to be around, that's what the darn map said! Turns out, the 2 storey high sculpture was a stone's throw from the fountain, we just somehow never saw it. Repeat this incident about 5 times and you can imagine why we decided we didn't have to see ALL the sculptures, just the ones we liked was sufficient. We slept well that night.


We also managed to catch Wicked - this hilarious musical about what happened before Dorothy (from the Wizard of Oz) arrived. Its wicked funny.


Because we spent so much time with our friends, apart from sightseeing downtown, getting lost in the streets doing the loop sculpture tour and doing the must-do Chicago River Architectural Cruise (Chicago Architecture is really an eye-opener), we spent most of our time experiencing Gay Chicago - thanks to our gay hosts. From the gay games (imagine an entire beach full of hunky gay boys & a couple of lezzies playing beach volleyball), to visiting the awesome homes of handsome gay friends, to waving our rainbow flags at the Chicago Gay Parade, it was an absofrigginlutely fantastic experience! Its an entirely different world, no one was bothered by sexuality (straight or otherwise) and there was a real kind of community. Geez, during gay pride weekend, the mayor of Chicago even put out a big ad in a major newspaper wishing everyone (gay & straight) happy pride!


So yes, there's our Chicago experience for you, well at least some of it. Chicago's a really nice place and without batting an eyelid, I would go back. Weather's a little chilly (yes, even in summer), food is fantastic (we had great Thai, Vietnamese, French and Chinese food - way better than what we have here!), nice people (not like those small town folk - more later), and just an overall really nice environment to live life.