We’ve just spent a long weekend in Chicago.  We stayed on the Magnificent Mile, which is a rather grand name for a shopping street, but it does mean that we were central and could easily explore on foot.  We did more shopping than I expected but I also got to walk round the parks.  We had a small kitchen in our apartment, but we did eat out quite a bit.  I do enjoy the food in America but we are still trying to adjust to American sized food portions.  For breakfast we ate at Wildberry Pancakes and Cafe.  Making the most of our jetlag we were there to queue for it opening at 6:30am.  I managed to eat around half of what I was given, which was probably still too much food.  I have asked why food portions are so big but I get answers like “we pride ourselves in the size of our portions” which doesn’t make much sense to me.  Why not put quality over quantity?

On Saturday night we went to see Eddie Izzard!  It was such an unexpected treat.  We walked by the Chicago Theatre on the way back to our hotel on Saturday afternoon and saw the adverts for the show.  We weren’t expecting to be able to get tickets but there were a few left and we ended up with good seats just a few rows back from the stage.  I was a little worried when giants turned up to sit in front of us but we could still see clearly.  The theatre was huge and wonderfully old fashioned but the seats were small and crushed together.  This didn’t cause me a problem but the people around me were all super-sized.  They must put something in the water here to make them grow.  The men in the row in front of me were all more than a foot taller than me.

Eddie Izzard was amazing on stage.  He looked fanstastic.  His suit was beautiful and I loved the red nail polish he was wearing.  He was tired after flying in from the D-Day 70th anniversary celebrations in France, but he owned the stage.  He has such presence and his rambling speaking style was incredibly amusing and had Marty wiping tears of laughter from his face many times during the two hour performance.

We’ve had a fantastic time I do like the city but I can’t imagine living here.  During the weekend there were 4 people killed in shootings and another 27 people injured.  The streets of the city were also filled with homeless people. I find the contrasts in how different sections of the community live hard to reconcile.