Fried chicken and Ferris Wheels

Saturday evening saw me heading downtown to Lakeview with one of my fellow INVO interns to go and meet one of the other interns who happens to live in Lakeview. The plan was to have a wander round the neighbourhood, get some fried chicken and head to the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel.

Lakeview is supposed to be one of the nicer neighbourhoods and I haven't been there before. I was starting to get cabin fever having been home ill for the last couple of days, so it was a great opportunity to get out, see some friends and talk to a live human being as opposed to a screen (me being ill means I can skype people at normal times during the week!).

I was wondering about the significance of us having to have fried chicken. Although I am relieved that we didn't have ice cream before as one of our party suggested....!?! But apparently this stuff is some of the best, so it had be had. Crisp is a small fast food restaurant that serves Korean style fried chicken and it was good! The Buffalo sauce was ok, although the mild option was still a bit on the spicy side. I dread to think what the suicide option would be like - I have a feeling if I took a certain person there he wouldn't be able to help himself but order that option, with regrets the following day. I tried my friend's chicken with the Seoul Sassy sauce, which was lovely, not too sweet and not too hot and very tasty. I wish I had followed my instincts and picked that one.

A bit further up the road was Smoque, a smoke shop for vapers. The verb "to vape" is used to describe the use of e-cigarettes. Since I am the only vaper in the intern crowd I thought it was really kind of them to think of me and take me to it. Smoque was really nice. The guys there were really friendly and were recommending different e-liquid flavours to try. They had a little comfy seating area with chairs arranged around a table on which was what can only be described as an electronic hookah. There you could hook up different chambers with flavoured e-liquid (no nicotine according to state laws) and give them a go. A nice alternative to ordering random flavours off the internet without having a clue what they will be like. I needed some new heads for my e-cig and I was delighted to find they had mine in stock. The guy wanted to borrow my current one for some kind of test which involved drilling extra holes in the base of it. The experiment worked and he gave me a few of their own hand-mixed flavours to try out as a thank you!

Smoque

My free e-liquid haul!

We were running late so we grabbed a taxi down to Navy Pier. The biggest tourist trap in Chicago. Not my favourite place and you have to keep your eyes open. Where there's tourists there's usually pick-pockets. Having said that, it was really pretty at night as you can see below.

We took the Ferris Wheel in the hope of getting to see the fireworks. Which we failed at since we misremembered the time they were gonna happen. Got some great views of the city instead.

I still don't feel amazing and am not sleeping very well, so those of us who had to get up to Evanston decided to call it a night. Which was wise since it took us nearly two hours to get home. But on the way we saw this.