I recently spent four days in Chicago attending an
educational research conference. While I was
thankful to be doing two presentations (one Literacy and one Math), I was really looking forward to visiting Chicago because C and I lived there for two years many
moons ago. We’ve only been back there a couple
of times since, most notably to attend a Blackhawks game when we were
completing our tour of all of the NHL arenas.
Chicago is such a great city!
I shared a hotel room with another doctoral student and so
we also traveled together. We flew to
Chicago first thing on Thursday morning, checked in to our hotel, and were
pleasantly surprised to learn that our room was ready and it was only 8:30 in the
morning! We stayed at Hotel Chicago,
which was a beautiful hotel. Our room
was on the 11th floor with a pretty decent view!
We were right next door to these two buildings and I took more photos of them than I care to admit because I was a little obsessed with them.
One of the things about this particular conference is that
it is huge. Sessions and events are
spread over a number of hotels, so you find yourself constantly traveling from
place to place, depending on what you want to attend.
My two presentations were Saturday morning and
Sunday morning, leaving plenty of time for other sessions. This also meant that we had time to wander
the city a little bit, which was awesome because my friend had a Flat Stanley
with her and she was on a mission to photograph him in as many places as
possible!
One of places we visited was new to me…Cloud Gate, or as it’s
more commonly known, The Bean. It was
constructed after C and I moved away from Chicago, so it was great to finally
see it in person!
On Saturday afternoon after my presentation, my friend and I
met up with another fellow doctoral student who had managed to get us tickets to the
Cubs-Padres game. While I appreciate the
history of Wrigley Field, I am very much an American League girl, and always
cheer for the White Sox over the Cubs. I
kept that bit of info to myself during the game, and was just excited to be
back at Wrigley Field, which we visited on occasion when we lived in Chicago.
As you can see from the photo, we had pretty good seats. We couldn’t see the outfield scoreboard, but
I was happy to not be sitting in the sun.
Or so I thought. The photo is
deceiving, because while it looked a beautiful day, it was freezing. Soooooooo cold, thanks to the wind. I had jeans and a hoodie on, which provided
some warmth, but I had worn flip flops, which proved to be a huge mistake. I had walked around in flip flops the
previous day and it was more than warm enough, so I didn’t even think about
wearing other shoes to the Cubs game.
When the Cubs entered the 9th inning up 6-2, I
thought for sure they’d get a quick three outs and we’d be able to go somewhere
to warm up. The fact that I wrote that
last sentence should tell you that is not what happened. But I was far from the only person thinking
that, as scores of people left the game at the beginning of the 9th
inning.
The Cubs allowed four runs and the Padres tied the game,
forcing extra innings. The good thing
about so many people leaving was that we were able to move down to seats closer
to the field for the final two innings and watch the Cubs win in the bottom of
the 11th. Clearly I’d never
seen the Cubs win at Wrigley because I heard the Cubs victory song, “Go Cubs
Go,” for the first time. It’s hard to
not get swept up in such a jubilant atmosphere!
So despite the frozen feet, I had a fabulous time at the game.
The only other thing worth mentioning was the pizza and the popcorn! We had
lunch one day at Giordano’s and the stuffed spinach pizza was just as delicious
as I had remembered, and we stopped at Garrett's for some of their famous popcorn. So yum!
Both presentations went quite well and even though it was a
tiring four days, I was glad to have found time for some fun along with way!
Happy Tails to you!
