Downtown Chicago - tourist style

Last week I had the pleasure of a brief visit from a friend and took the opportunity to finally head to downtown Chicago. Some of you might be wondering what the hell I have been doing all this time and why I haven't been before. Well, there's a couple of reasons. Walking round a city sightseeing by yourself sucks. Yes, it's exciting to see a new place but it's much more fun to do it with company. I knew my friend was coming over so I decided it would be more fun to wait for her arrival and spend the day sightseeing together. The other reason is that I have been warned by many that the metro is not exactly the safest place, and I am acutely aware that as a young(ish), lone female, I make a pretty easy target (I can also be pretty damn naive sometimes, as close friends and family will attest).

I'm not sure why I have been more wary of exploring downtown Chicago by myself than other places. I've been all over the place to quite a few cities on my own, London, New York, Boston, and Amsterdam, to name a few. I think it maybe perhaps because the presence of guns seems to be more ubiquitous here. All around the University there are "No guns" signs on the building doors, and it's the same in many shops. I don't remember seeing that in Boston or New York. In addition, Chicago seems to have quite a high rate of gun crime. The 4th July weekend saw 11 deaths and over 60 wounded in shootings.

So, with a slight hangover after my 4th July celebrations, I headed downtown to The Loop to meet my friend. First stop was to head to Michigan Avenue a.k.a The Magnificent Mile. I'll explain why it is called that later. Our destination was the river front to get tickets to go on a River Boat Architecture Cruise. I'm not one for museums, usually eschewing them in favour of wandering round a city and exploring the neighbourhoods. However, I had been recommended by several people to go on this boat cruise. There are several available by different operators, however we took the one offered by the Chicago Architectural Foundation. It was a really good decision. The guy we had was so knowledgeable and the stories he was telling about how modern Chicago came to be were really interesting. Taking a boat cruise along the two arms of the river gives a completely different perspective on Chicago to seeing it from the side walk. At least for me, I got an appreciation for how this city came to be. While 40 bucks might seem a bit steep, I think it was well worth it. There are other tour operators, but I got the impression that their passengers weren't getting as richly told stories as we were.

The beauty of the River Boat Architecture Cruise is the fact that you get to see much better how the buildings reflect their environment

I knew jobs like this existed. But it's something else seeing someone actually doing it

Lunch was next on the cards. The advantage of having a US phone contract is the fact that you don't have to rely on wifi. A quick check of tripadvisor gave me a couple of options for decent places to try in the vicinity. I love tripadvisor for restaurant recommendations.  We used it in Croatia to plan all our meals out and it worked brilliantly. The only rubbish meal we had out there was the only time we ignored the tripadvisor reviews in favour of the place being nearby, and it was spectacularly bad! In Chicago, we ended up at The Purple Pig, currently ranked number 12 on the Chicago restaurant tripadvisor ratings. Apparently mum had read about it in some magazine, so we were pretty lucky to get a seat at the bar straight away. The food was fantastic, even more so because it was so affordable. The Purple Pig is a very friendly place, the waiting staff are lovely and the food is based around sharing platters. We had the pork rillettes from the "Smears" section, scallop spiedini and some rib tips, which were amazing. The wonderful thing here is you can order as you go along. So if you are still peckish, you can pick something else from the menu. Although after these, we were stuffed!

We headed up the Magnificent Mile, so called because it is full of shops, both regular clothing stores to high end places. Little shopping was done, not because we didn't want to, but there was so much more to see. We then backtracked and headed back down via the lake front towards Navy Pier, stopping at the beach and a fab beach bar playing salsa style beats for a beer along the way.

The walk towards the beach  and Navy Pier (where the Ferris wheel is). If you look closely you'll see someone swimming, which is amazing considering how cold the water is at the moment!

The people on these boats were definitely having a party - definitely need to make friends with someone who owns a boat!

Navy Pier is apparently Chicago's biggest tourist attraction. It reminded me of an upmarket Coney Island (an amusement park area with a boardwalk on the sea near NY). Navy Pier is well known for its amusement attractions and fireworks display every Wednesday and Saturday night. We were pretty knackered by the time we got here. It was a nice place, full of families. There were also some nice views back towards the city.

The Navy Pier Ferris Wheel

We had had plans of grabbing some food but night was starting to fall so we wandered back to The Loop walking along the lake and via Millenium Park, so I could get on the underground before it got too late.

A glimpse of Millenium Park

Impressions? I love Chicago, it's a beautiful city. I'm really looking forward to exploring it further when another friend swings by next weekend to visit.