Holiday Log #4: Chicago
Day 5: 25/11/2006 Chicago
Chicago's Skyline
Chinatown
Me at North Michigan AveSome random stuff: I realised everyone, after staying in the US for a while, will become a fan of Pepperidge Farm. Even GCS bought 2 packets of Milano from the supermarket (when it was NOT having discount) and asked me to try it; of course, as I have already known, it is very nice. Haha I get very excited when Giant starts to sell Pepperidge Farm cookies for $2.00 (usual $2.99, and it happened before Thanksgiving), and needless to say, Walmart forever sells it at $1.97...
And it's true that even Pepperidge Farm bread is more tasty than other brands. Just that they are too expensive for day to day consumption.
Back to my holiday log.
Jess and Deb left in the morning; I think GCS sent them to O'Hare to take a bus back to Wisconsin. When GCS returned, the rest of us went to Chinatown to eat dim sum. This was when I knew how big Chicago's Chinatown is... It is one whole area, which includes one pedestrian street that takes you 5 minutes to walk from one end to another. We wanted to go to Phoenix (which has dim sum buffet apparently), but the queue was too long so we went to another one. Again, it serves completely HK style food (complete with beef trifes! beat that), has a completely neighbourhood HK style atmosphere, people (both waiters and patrons) speak completely HK style language (in which I was summoned by GCS for my expertise in that language), and hence the food was also completely HK neighbourhood standard. Excellent experience :)
How I wish they can reproduce the Singapore experience there also... Though I know I am asking for a bit too much :P and this also gets to show how widespread Hongkongers are and how diligently the emigrants try to reproduce their own community while overseas. The dim sum, the milk tea, the yuan yang, are all exactly IDENTICAL to what I can get in HK, even the atmosphere and setting! Now I understand why my mum's relatives can come to the US and survive for 20 years not knowing how to speak English at all. They don't have to essentially...(There are shopkeepers in Chinatown who cannot even speak English properly! That is actually quite terrible isn't it? Yes the US is diverse, but also divided in this sense? How different would it be when compared to Colonial Singapore, where the British, for convenience and simplicity, separated the different races in different regions which in the end built up to the racial riots in the 1960s? Luckily, at least from what I observed, this is not happening to my friends in university...)
Enough of that. In the afternoon we took a bus downtown, toured Millenium Park (with the cool structure in the middle of it), saw Sears Towers from far, passed by Navy Pier without knowing it, walked through North Michigan Ave (a.k.a. The Magnificant Mile), admired the tall buildings and some of the architecture, bought some stuff, and then went to eat again :) This time it was spicy food, Heaven on Seven (600 N. Michigan Ave). Good stuff: Gumbo soup, Shrimp Voodoo Linguini (really A LOT of shrimps; though the nice part is not the shrimp but the sauce). If you are into hot food, try their Shrimp Angry; I didn't eat that but even Wei Hong the chilli king find it a bit difficult to take :P and they have ALL SORTS of hot sauce, the bottles fills up half the table and there is one big wall-shelf all filled with hot sauce bottles. We tried to ask where they all came from, but to no avail, as usual...
Then we went movie-hopping (no one cares, everyone does it, so we did). Watched The Prestige and Stranger than Fiction. Both are very good shows, though I find The Prestige better. I have not entered a movie theatre since ORD I think (which shows that, indeed, people in the army are more free...), and hence was too lazy to think about the movie, what it means, what it is supposed to tell me, etc. They are just good. Go and watch them.
