Well it finally happened - I've arrived in a new US city and it hasn't become my new favourite. Which is not a criticism of Chicago, it's a great place, but my perspective seems to have shifted as my secondment draws to an end, I am becoming resentful of time spent away from home, and tired of novelty.
Frank Sinatra famously sang that "Chicago is my kind of town", but then again he was basically a gangster so that's hardly surprising. (I expect there is an Al Capone tour you can do here, and that might have been interesting, particularly after seeing the prison island where Capone ended up just last week.) Sinatra also gave Chicago the nickname "toddling town" which apparently means a town you can walk slowly home in after a few drinks, although I am not sure it is necessarily more true of here than anywhere else (and there are certainly places you wouldn't want to dawdle in). No, for me the musical reference to Chicago which rings truest is Doris Day's "Just flew in from the Windy City", a song in which, for all the city's attractions, Chicago cannot compete with her hometown, and that is pretty much how I feel about almost everywhere in the USA at the moment.
I arrived on Saturday afternoon after an early start and a long flight. I spent Saturday afternoon wandering round the main shopping street, the so-called Magnificent Mile. It's like Blackpool's Golden Mile without the hen parties, or Edinburgh's Royal Mile without the bloody great castle towering over the skyline. In short it is lots of people spending money on stuff, which may seem magnificent to some people but as far as I am concerned is just a means to an end (in this case acquiring some cufflinks as cheaply as possible as I had forgotten to pack any). Still, any shopping experience where the retail outlets are separated by outdoors is better than an enclosed mall, which I detest.
On Sunday I had a leisurely breakfast in the hotel and demonstrated the new assertiveness I have picked up over here when I sent back my "frittata of the day" on the grounds that it was "a bit dry". This frittata was not fried as the name suggests (well, it does if you speak Italian, the rest of you will either have to take my word for it or sign up for night school classes), rather it was oven baked in an iron skillet, which was blamed for the leathery texture. We compromised, and they made me an omelette containing the same ingredients as the frittata of the day (which happened to be cheese, ham and onion). This was a marked improvement, as well as being closer to what I expected a frittata to be in the first place, and I was so pleased with the bravery I had demonstrated in sending the food back that I left the generous 20% tip that I always leave because apparently it's expected and if you don't the server starves in a garret.
The hotel itself was not great. I have taken to getting my hotels booked via the UK, because the travell agent which our firm uses in the UK will pay the costs up front, whereas any hotels booked for me in the USA have to be paid for by me and then the cost reclaimed. So it wasn't my choice, nor the hotel recommended by my US colleagues. But at the end of the day a bed is a bed, and at least the nightclub was only audible on Saturday night. I've avoided a repeat of the breakfast fiasco by buying cereal from a supermarket and squeezing a bottle of milk into my "lavishly stocked minibar", no doubt the chambermaid now thinks I am mean or eccentric.
I spent the rest of Sunday wandering round Chicago's Art Institute, which is a huge gallery famous in particular for its collection of French impressionists. It has two very famous pictures, American Gothic and Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte. I always get irritated at the crowds around famous pictures in galleries, especially when you want to sit back and take in the whole picture but can't because idiots keep walking in front of you to take photographs on a mobile phone. I really can't see the point of photographing works of art when photographs of those same works of art are so readily available on the internet (see for example the hyperlinks I created above using Google). It is not as though somebody is going to go through your snaps and say "I love the way you've captured the light bouncing off the brush strokes", your version isn't going to be better than the one in the gift shop. Perhaps they are worried that they may become forgetful in old age and need their own photo of the Mona Lisa to prove the've actually been to the Louvre?
But despite my irritations, I loved the gallery. It is huge, and has so many beautiful paintings. I felt quite moved by some of them, particularly one called "The Lark" by Jules Bréton, and the Rodin portraits. Maybe prolonged separation from my family makes me liable to cry more readily? I spent several hours there, walked for what seemed like hours around the miles of rooms, before meeting up with a colleague for an enjoyable dinner.
So what have I learned from my Chicago trip?
(1) There are a lot of homeless people begging on the streets here, and it is bitterly cold compared to California. I felt quite helpless in the face of so much poverty and inequality.
(2) As with so many cities, the transport systems are designed for people who already know how to use them. The machine selling railway tickets would only take a credit card where that associated billing address had a US Zip Code - hardly a warm international welcome! But I feel I have got the hang of it now and the city seems well served by the train network.
(3) Even here there are loads of Spanish speakers and evidence of tex-mex influence on food. One thing that has annoyed me more than anything else in this country is the number of people who have repeated comments about how bad the food is in England. I am not sure what they base this on - coach tours maybe - but I have to ask if they are shopping in the same supermarkets as I am over here, because they really need to get real about themselves!
(4) The Grande Jatte picture was the subject of a Stephen Sondheim musical called "Sunday in the Park with George". But I'm more of a Doris Day fan.
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