Downtown and Deep Dish Pizza

The next day, we went downtown. We saw Millenium Park, Buckingham Fountain, and of course, the famous Chicago Bean. The Chicago Park District is beautiful, and I got some great photos of the park and city! However, the number of people was too damn high!

After that, we randomly stumbled upon a film screening that was taking place that afternoon at the Chicago Cultural Centre. The film was called “70 acres” and was followed by a discussion. We had some time to kill and thought we'd check it out. The movie was about public housing in Chicago and how the city demolished the homes of many residents leaving them homeless. The discussion afterwards was extremely interesting. What happened to a lot of these residents of the public housing neighbourhoods was really unfair, filled with false promises from city politicians. The underlying theme was the racism that a lot of African-American people faced in Chicago. I talked earlier about how there were some areas of Chicago which were not so nice, and there really was a disparity between rich and poor. More often than not, the poor were African-Americans. It really was unfortunate, but enlightening, and the producer was actually a Canadian! This definitely wasn't in our itinerary, but it was a well-spent afternoon.

It was starting to approach dinner time, and we wanted to see Navy Pier (just a pier...) at night, so we headed towards it. We walked up Michigan Avenue towards an area known as the Magnificent Mile.

We soon arrive at the “Magnificent Mile”, and we're not impressed. There are a ton of stores with all the big brands, and with even bigger logos... it was a glorified shopping district in my opinion. Whatever, we get to say we saw it.

We get to the end of the Magnificent Mile and decide to get some dinner... a Deep Dish Pizza! Apparently, Chicago is famous for this. The Pizza is really, really filling. Its basically a TON of cheese, and a lot of chewy dough. It takes 45 minutes to make, and two slices fill you up. My Dad and I somehow shared a small pizza which was six slices...

Before checking out the Navy Pier, we head to the Chicago Water Tower... just a vertical mall. But what was cool is they had a sports museum at the top... had to check it out.

What was even better was the lady let me in for free... the conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, can I get a ticket?

Her: What's your favourite sports team?

Me: Well, I'm from Toronto, so...

Her: So, not the Blackhawks?

Me: Unfortunately, not.

*She hands me a ticket*

*I hand her a twenty*

Her: Don't worry about it...

Maybe she felt sorry for me as a Toronto sports fan?

The museum was great, learned some more stuff about Chicago sports, and then we left for Navy Pier. It was pretty cool, really nice at night with lights and everything, and I got some good shots of the city. I also have to compliment the city's transit system... very easy to learn and the buses were very frequent, but I guess that's any big city. The trains did seem run down though.