Have you ever arrived at a party and realised that no one you know has arrived yet? But there’s a free bar, so you grab a drink and mingle?
Lesson learned: the mingling bit is significantly harder when you’re in Poland, and everybody else is speaking Polish.
Nevertheless, I had a great and productive two weeks in Warsaw. As most people know, the city was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, but the modern replacement which rose from the ruins is a lot more attractive than the Soviet brutalism you might imagine. Meanwhile, Old Town is quite astonishing as a monument to rebirth and reconstruction.
A baseball player (don’t ask) in Warsaw’s Old Town
Monument to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944
Another reminder of the uprising
MARIE CURIE WAS POLISH
Not sure what this was doing in the middle of Warsaw, but I like it
Only 1444 km away!
Other highlights included ordering French food with Steven (with a horrified “that’s not French…” reaction when it arrived), museums to the Warsaw Uprising and Jewish History, and my artificially-engineered multi-stop journey home on the last night just so that I could try the underground system. (Clean, bright and purple, with trains arriving every few minutes, if you were wondering.) I also enjoyed a walking tour which ended in free vodka shots – and very refreshingly cold they were too!
As a wonderful bonus, Katie and I also spent one of the weekends in Prague. Everybody always says Prague is beautiful, and it didn’t disappoint. After taking an overnight sleeper train – which I will always find inherently joyful and thrilling, especially when there’s no messing about with passports or border controls – we took a walking tour to take in all the main sights. And man, this walking tour was good. Our guide, Karel, was engaging and charismatic, and a perfect introduction to the city. (A city no less charming for the fact that beer is literally cheaper than bottled water.)
Is there anything cooler than a transnational sleeper train?
Welcome to Prague
Not pictured: Weeping Angels descending from Prague Castle to kill us
Scenes of death made us awkward
After a ‘Premium Economy’ upgraded flight back (oh ye gods of yield management pricing), I arrived back in Chicago in time for another Groupon Summer StreetFest. And a heatwave. As April and I laboured over a game of giant Jenga, it felt more like a military exercise…
If Katie hadn’t visited, I’d blog about a few things:
Ingrid Michaelson at the Chicago Theatre
- Wine tasting and a major sand dune-based construction stimulus package in Michigan
- Ramya leaving for Palo Alto; Anthony seeing her off with Malört
- Gathering on picnic blankets in Millennium Park for an open-air and alcohol-friendly screening of Back to the Future. (It frustrates me that Marty grants himself a mere ten minutes at the end to try and prevent Doc’s death. I leave more buffer time to catch a train.)
- Seeing Ingrid Michaelson act all kooky but lovable in concert at the Chicago Theatre. For some reason that I made up in my head that she and Sara Bareilles were both Australian. For the record, they are not.
- Curating a ‘Trashy British TV Night’ for Catherine and Jason. The British Council should probably be paying me. (No likey? No lighty!)
But Katie did visit, so let’s skip straight to that instead:
Kayaking down the Chicago River!
Saddened by the age restrictions at Maggie Daley Park (not a joke)
Waiting outside Kuma’s Corner
The nicest Chicago-style pizza I’ve had so far at Lou Malnati’s
With a retired ex-raver pig on the roof
In addition, we (finally!) visited the Field Museum, drunk strictly non-alcoholic cocktails at the top of the Hancock Centre, enjoyed a cheeky Nando’s at their newly opened Chicago location, played an exhausting game of Munchkin against Jatherine, admired Lincoln (who doesn’t?) and continued to funnel lots of breakfast money into Windy City Café. And special mention to the Urban Kayaks tour – it’s a wonderful way to see the city afresh, and highly recommended.
I think I’ve had more than my fair share in life, but I still love surprise birthdy parties 🙂
British atmospherics
Theron and Todd with the TARDIS
With Catherine, Jason and Katie’s cake!
Nolan, Chrissy, Robert, Thomas
One more with the TARDIS because Katie took such great photos
With the person who organised it all 😉
Thank you so much to everyone who came: Billy, Taylor, Agata, Emilie, Ellen, Robert, Julie, Shelby, Benno, Calvin, Nolan, Chrissy, Brandon, Carolyn, Theron, Catherine, Jason, Ramya, Abhishek, Karol, Kevin, Corey and ESPECIALLY to:
- Todd, who organised a British-themed trivia quiz (which my team thankfully won else I’d never hear the end of it)
- Katie, who baked cakes and took photos and decorated and is generally awesome
- Randi, who masterminded the whole thing and is (a) untrustworthy (b) amazing ❤
And also to my sisters who contributed British phrases in advance! (Did you know that “lost the plot” is not part of American English? That’s a real loss.) I love all of the above.
Turning 26 means I’ve been living in Chicago for a little over a year, and I am still blown away by the warmth and generosity of the people in my life here. It’s sad that immigration is never seen in these terms back at home. Instead it’s all migration statistics, spurious debates about welfare and tough talk about border controls. If we spent a fraction of the time celebrating instead what it takes to make people feel welcome, we’d be a happier people.
They were excited in West Branch, Iowa when native son Herbert Hoover became President. It didn’t last.
No one seemed very excited about our trip to Iowa. “Why are you going to Iowa?” asked most. So I’m pleased to announce the following discovery: Iowa is lovely. Quiet, rural, unassuming – I am assuming this will be a once-in-a-lifetime visit – but still lovely. And as Reddit correctly predicted, the people we met were all delightful, which puts Iowans way ahead of fancy-pants Seattleites.
If you’ve heard anything at all about Iowa, it’s probably because it always snags first spot in the voting schedule for the Presidential primary elections, briefly catapulting the state onto global news bulletins for a few days every four years. With candidates already swarming to patronise woo the electorate, we were hoping to bump into something political, and as luck would have it our first night’s B&B just happened to be run by enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporters. So naturally we stuck around the next morning to watch her ‘launch’ speech and pose with banners:
Hillary for Iowa! Also, for the other 49 states too!
Later on, in unimaginatively-named Iowa City, we dined in Hamburg Inn No. 2 – which it seems is mandatory for any sort of political career in the US – and, in West Branch, we checked out the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum. Hoover is best remembered for being in office during the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, and the museum’s main strategy for tackling this unfortunate fact is to focus about 80% of the exhibit on his pre-presidential humanitarian efforts.
Hoover’s ‘good guy’ credentials thus burnished, they offer an increasingly desperate series of excuses for Hoover’s failure, culminating in “who’s to say it wouldn’t have been worse without him?”, and then a series of buttons to canvas your opinion on Hoover from ‘Strongly Positive’ (hah!) to ‘Strongly Negative’. I gave him one level up from the bottom. Hell, I can think of worse Presidents…
They wouldn’t let me get as close to Hoover as LBJ, but we still enjoyed some quality fishing time together
On Sunday, the weather brightened up and we stopped at Lake Macbride State Park for a spot of swimming and kayaking, which always reminds me of our Wednesday afternoon Sixth Form kayaking lessons down at the Ladbroke Gove canal. Anyway. Kayaking is fun!
Left, right, left, right, stop to pose
Also in Iowa:
- A sign at ‘Family Video’ by the highway promises Report Card A’s Equals Free Rentals!
- It’s not always easy to find vegetarian options on menus.
- But it is easy to find great ice cream at Whitey’s (thanks, Nolan).
- The city of Davenport has built itself a seemingly pointless but enchanting Skybridge.
- Roads are empowered to suddenly declare that ‘pavement ends’ and leave you stranded on miles of unpaved track. We didn’t stay on it long enough to discover what the ‘minimum maintenance’ section would be like.
A fair bit of Iowa was like this
And in Kalona (population: 2,363) the large proportion of Mennonites gave the place a distinctive feel:
You know what I like about horses? They don’t turn on red.
“Not This Frog”
As I say, everyone was super-Mid-Western-friendly. We so enjoyed talking to Daisy, the owner of Iowa City’s A Bella Vista, that we risked the late return of our rental car to stay and chat longer. But the final word should go to owners of Strawberry Farm Bed & Breakfast after we finally turned up at 11pm. Despite the late hour they launched into a discussion of their dog, their neighbours and – most importantly – the frog which was currently perched on their front door.
“Do you know what this is?” the guy asked, but my hopes of being the unexpectedly knowledgeable city boy (“it’s a frog!”) were soon dashed as he began to list possible species. “It reminds me of having dinner under the skylight when we were growing up”, his wife added, “and we’d look up and see this frog. Not this frog.”
Perhaps we were just tired, but it felt like a moment.
IOWA, YEAH
The 606 (with guests)
A smorgasbord of things to post about:
- Improv comedy featuring fellow megachurch attendee Kannan in Fucked Up Family Reunion. Sadly my family isn’t nearly interesting enough to qualify, but another audience member stepped up to the plate to provide material.
- Take the Armenian genocide, mix with a dysfunctional marriage and you get Beast on the Moon – an unsurprisingly intense play about two survivors living in 1920s Milwaukee. Bonus theatre points: the playwright turned out to be sitting behind us.
- Hayao Miyazaki’s swansong, The Wind Rises, was first released in 2013 but Katie tipped me off to a showing and I was delighted to catch it in the cinema. Like his other films that I’ve seen, My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, the imagination and wandering narrative is quite different to most Hollywood films, and the film’s thoughtful and nuanced approach to Japanese engineering during WW2 is probably evidence that ‘losing’ countries make better art. Plus the short, angry boss character is quite wonderful.
- After another term of SPARK mentoring, I attended another ‘Discovery Night’ where students in the programme present their projects to classmates and parents. Huge thanks to Katie for stepping in midway through to mentor!
- At Simon’s suggestion, Randi and I caught the Chicago leg of Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox tour – vintage covers of Taylor Swift, One Direction, Magic! and more. It was a lot of fun, even from the nosebleeds.
- We also saw Ex Machina (along with Kevin and Nolan) which was creepy, wonderful, and left me deeply disturbed and distrusting of everyone around me in case they were actually vengeful robots with AI.
- And finally, today was 06/06/2015 – or, in American dating formatting, 06/06/2015. Which was nice, because (a) it doesn’t make my new t-shirt look stupid, and (b) it was also the opening day of Chicago’s new elevated ‘Bloomingdale Trail’ or ‘The 606‘. Basically, it’s like New York’s High Line, but in Chicago, and about double the length at 3 miles (so there). Opening day was fortuitously sunny and pulled in large, good-natured crowds with some very reasonably priced beer, live music and some free memorabilia. Looking to take a Chicago visitor on a good stroll? It’s been a long time coming, but the 606 has finally arrived, and it’s a pretty great addition to the city below.
At the 606 launch with Randi, Katie and Brandon
Beth E . Dubowe-Lawrence on China, Part 3: Chongqing & Chengdu: “Again an awesome adventure to share this with you” Apr 21, 19:13
