Illinois is Illin’

Yes, I am still alive! I’ve just been chilling out in Chicago since Monday and been pretty occupied with soaking up one of my favourite cities and hanging out with some fine Chicago folk I met last here last year.

I sort-of saw the city last year so I was pretty familiar with where I was and where I was going, but considering I spent 3 of 4 days at Lollapalooza I didn’t realise how little I actually experienced till I came again this time. This year’s Lollapalooza was only 3 or so weeks ago and the evidence is still apparent in Grant Park, and walking through it only made me wish even more that I made it along. Oh well, there’s always next year.

Buckingham Fountain, Grant Park

I’m still amazed by Cloudgate (aka ‘The Bean’). Especially on such brilliantly blue-skied days as the past few, there are people out everywhere, the place is buzzing and it’s fun just watching it reflect and bend images. I don’t know, I probably sound a little crazy. I also found it really hard to stop myself from photobombing other people’s photos by getting my reflection in the background of their photos, but I tried not to be a dick (for once), so there were no ruined vacation photos for anyone. This time around.

As always, plenty of other cool sculptures and public displays. I’m hardly into art, but I love the creative spirit of the city, there’s always something cool to geeze and gawk at.

Tuesday I went for a bit more of a walk, but this time more up Lincoln Park way (north of the city), and after hours and miles of walking I kept thinking I’m about to break. Also went up towards Goose Island, which I guess is kinda like the Newtown of Chicago…. Cool shops, full of bars etc.

This is more for Damien (and Mel?) since he’s probably the only one who has any idea what I’m on about, but I came across even more MBW artwork. This guy is everywhere!

I even managed to get on down to the corner shop which was the setting for the record shop in High Fidelity.  It’s all boarded up and useless these days, locals probably wondering why I was being a weirdo and taking photos of a derelict shop front.

One thing I missed doing last year was heading to Chicago Zoo. Not that it’s anything particularly special, but it’s a free zoo and hey, why not? So I get down there and I came across a barnyard farm. You know the type, cows, chickens, rabbits, goats, that kind of thing. Pretty disappointing when you’re expecting hippos and bears and monkeys and cool animals. Then I read the sign: “Farm At The Zoo”.

So turns out they have an actual zoo. With actual hippos and bears and monkeys and cool animals. And for a free zoo, it was pretty sweet. My favourite bit was getting to MAKE my own plastic gorilla souveneir toy with a totally bitchin’ old school ‘Mold-O-Matic’… Though the irony of a zoo preaching the message of conservation and then encouraging you to make plastic toys was not lost.

I think I’m going to name him Jordan, after former White Sox baseball superstar, Michael. I think the dude had a bit of a career in basketball too.

Now for the “awww” factor:

This one's for Megan... I don't suppose you remember the "Bird Of Prey" song, do you?

Penguins

...and polar bears

You could be like Damien and go to the arctic circle to see puffins. Or you could go to a free zoo. HA! Joke’s on him

One of the best things about travelling is the people you meet. Last year at the end of the last day of Lollapalooza I made friends with some Chicago girls on the way back to the hostel (being the total ladies man that I am, of course), and the short story is instead of getting back to the hostel within the 20 mins it should have taken, we ended up hanging out for a few hours, cruising round the city and getting up to shenanigans. Ended up staying in contact with them and this time around caught up again and even had a couch to crash on for a couple nights. So good being able to live in the comfort of a house than in a 6-12 person dorm, sharing the world’s dodgiest bathrooms.

They took me out to see a bit more of the city and up to a bar on the 96^th floor of one of the highest buildings in Chicago (The Hancock Center). It’s really quite hard to grasp the size of the city until you view it from such a vantage point. Walking along you become dwarfed among the abundance of high rises (I was amazed to discover they even have a high rise prison in the city), and without being able to see anywhere in the distance from the ground it’s hard to put into perspective just how far and wide it spreads.

The views are incredible from up there in that bar. Such a good idea to go up there, and I snapped a few pretty cool photos.

In Philadelphia at the moment, updates on that coming soon. Bye for now.

Sign language to The Gaslight Anthem

more about "Sign language to The Gaslight Anthem", posted with vodpod

Post tour wrap-up

I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple weeks now since I never did really get around to updating everyone on most of the Candian/American sector on the trip…

So I left off talking about the Blink 182 show in Milwaukee and 10 for $10 Tour. Here’s some pictures for you to have a bit of a geeze at:

Fall Out Boy

Fall Out Boy, with a slightly better view of the amphitheatre venue

Blink 182 - unfortunately didn't get many get photos

After 10 for $10 I back-tracked my way to Chicago, taking about 5 or 6 hours to complete what is normally only a 2.5 hour trip. It was nice, I stopped off a few times along the way, even went to one of Michigan’s state parks to go for a swim in Lake Michigan. Beautiful day, great weather and the water was a great temperature. Driving into Chicago was a bit of a pain, the traffic there is insane.

The next day was the first of Lollapalooza and it just so happened that the car drop-off point was about 2 blocks from the festival, so it was nice to be able to drive myself to the festival pretty much. The whole 3 days were a bit of a blur to me, so I’m not even going to bother trying to write a blow-by-blow review, not that it would be all that interesting to read anyway…but there were a few observations I made:

• The festival felt like it had no real personality to it… Every other festival I can remember going to always seems to have something interesting to see or do other than watch music, even if it’s just market stalls or some kind of performance art… this festival had virtually none of that, just 8 stages spread across one huge park.
• They had people doing sign language to all the mainstage bands… seriously, what the hell?
• Grant Park is one huge mofo of a park. One end to the other (mainstage to mainstage) would take a good 10-15 minutes without battling your way past anyone.
• Perry Farrel still loves himself.

Lolla sign

In front of Buckingham Fountain, the centrepiece of Grant Park

I don’t remember everything I saw, and I did see a lot of partial sets, but here’s what I can recall:

Friday
Manchester Orchestra
Gringo Starr
The Knux
Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears
The Gaslight Anthem
Kevin Divine
Ben Folds
Fleet Foxes
The Decemberists
Peter, Bjorn & John
Andrew Bird
Kings of Leon
Depeche Mode (does 1.5 songs count as seeing them?)

Saturday
Living Things
Constantines
Miike Snow
Los Campesinos
Care Bears On Fire
Perry Farrel
Arctic Monkeys
Coheed and Cambria (about 4 minutes. Bummer)
No Age
Glasvega
Rise Against
After this point I fell asleep in a hammock and woke up about 20 minutes into Tool

Sunday
Mike’s Pawn Shop (about 1 song)
Sam Roberts Band
Friendly Fires
Portugal. The Man
Kaiser Chiefs
The Raveonettes
Vampire Weekend
Cold War Kids
Snoop Dogg (whitest crowd ever)
Lou Reed
Deerhunter
Silversun Pickups
Jane’s Addiction (with Joe Perry from Aerosmith helping out on “Jane Says”)

All in all it was a pretty good weekend. Randomly made some friends with some people yelling at everyone to give them high-fives… We ended up walking through the streets of Chicago for a couple hours, grabbing a late night feed, trying to go for a swim in the pool at one of their siblings’ block of apartments (indoor pool, doors locked after 11pm… nawww). Turned out to be such a fun night.

Chicago itself is pretty cool… Lots of cool things to see and explore, I was a little disappointed by Navy Pier but Millenium Park was pretty cool. As it turned out I didn’t really have as much time as I was hoping to have in Chicago, so I missed out on a few of the touristy things such as Lincoln Park Zoo, Sears Tower and Reckless Records (it was the store in High Fidelity). I suppose there’s always next time

River that runs through Chicago

Massive chrome bean scultpure in Milennium Park

The flight to San Francisco with United Airways was a fun story as I’ve probably already told a few of you. Before I go on I must mention all my flights were booked through AirNZ as a round-the-world trip… Long story short I was told I had to go to the gate to get my “seat allocation” (ie. boarding pass). I do as I’m told and ask the people at the desk for my seat allocation, only to be told I can’t do that through them and I have to go talk to the Air New Zealand people… I go on a wild goose chase looking for Air New Zealand reps (which of there are none – AirNZ don’t fly to Chicago…), eventually go back to the United check in counter and explain the situation… After lots of arguing that, yes, I definitely went to the right check-in counter and I did nothing wrong, the check-in girl rings the gate only to find out the woman thought I was asking for a REceipt. Anyway, after this wild goose chase I went on I should have missed my flight, and the only saving grace was the flight was delayed by an hour. Very lucky indeed, and a stress I just did not need.

San Francisco was amazing. Just as beautiful as I remember as a child and the perfect place to end my trip when I had a bit of money to burn. First day I got there was pretty funny, within 10 mins of venturing out of my hotel I managed to bump into some family friends who then had me around for dinner and then drove me to a gig I was going to that night… Was really nice to see some familiar faces again and have a good chat. The bands I saw were The Copyrights (who were really really fun) and Cobra Skulls (also very fun, but I’m not really into the who rockabilly thing).

The next day I did the touristy stuff, walked to Pier 39 and saw the seals, then rented a bike and rode up to and across the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather was generally great that day but there was a lot of low-lying cloud that made the bridge almost impossible to see in the distance. I got mega sunburn that day… Later in the evening I went and bought myself a sexy new Fender P-bass… it’s only a mexi, but still looks and sounds sweet.

The Golden Gate Bridge is there somewhere...

Riding over the Golden Gate Bridge

The last morning I had I went and did what I had planned all along – to blow the last of my cash at Amoeba Music. 3.5 hours and around US$100 spent per hour, I came out with almost 30 CD’s and a generous handful of vinyl. Damn it was nice to go on a spree like that after being pretty conservative with what I bought for most of the trip. Spent so much time there I had only enough time to grab some lunch, pick up the skateboard I had been eyeing off the day before and get back to the hotel to catch the transfer to the airport.

The flights all went pretty smoothly, except when New Zealand security confiscated my skateboard because I was bringing it as carry on and it could be used as a weapon… despite the fact I had just come off TWO US-boarded flights with it as carry on. Thankfully it really wasn’t much of a big deal, I just spoke with some AirNZ staff who managed to check it in for me.

All’s well that ends well.

I couldn’t help myself

was going through my RSS feeds this afternoon and came across an interesting item about a little festival happening in Chicago around the time I was expecting to be there:

US$190 later…