Day 15: We Venture Out

With Jason's mom being our first official out-of-town guest, we were driven outside to show off our new hometown. A good thing too, as I'm not sure how long it might have taken us to get our tourism done without the prompting of a guest. (Although I do have my King Tut tickets ordered! I hear Oprah was there just last week.)
Today's adventures included the architecture cruise (where they mentioned about 12 times that the whole town had burned down years ago), a strut down Michigan Avenue, and popping up to the top of the Hancock Tower, via the fastest elevator in North America, for a view of the city (see photo above.)

We learned about how the current of the Chicago River was reversed after 5% of the town died from cholera one summer. An engineering feat accomplished only one other time in history, somewhere in Russia. We were advised that Lake Michigan is a great big melted glacier. Lake Michigan impressed me even during our initial house-hunting visits with its expansive size and its beautiful blue-green hue, unlike the color of any lake I'd seen before. Our drinking water is from Lake Michigan, and the pretty color probably makes that fact a little more palatable.

Part of today's education included a recitation of this poem, which captures Chicago's gritty industrial past as well as its stance as a city standing out on the prairie:

CHICAGO by Carl Sandburg

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities...