Actually, it’s been a few weeks since Summer, our friend from Memphis, came up for a visit. But I just got around to loading some of the photos from her trip, so I thought I would post about it. She arrived on a Saturday morning by train, and we picked her up at the downtown Union Station. It even snowed for her as we left the station and made our way to our apartment and eventually breakfast at one of our favorites spots, Toast. Check out my dish below, the French Toast Orgy.
Unfortunately, Apryl was busy most of Summer’s stay but I had no jobs going on at the time, so Summer and I got to hang out. One day we spent the entire day just walking around downtown Chicago, which gave me an excuse to take some snap shots of the city, including the typical photo under the tracks:
We spent a lot of time at Millennium Park which contains such Chicago landmarks as the Cloud Gate, Crown Fountain, and the Jay Pritzker Pavillon. There were even people still ice skating in the park at the time. Check out the photos I grabbed below:
Afterwards, we ventured back through the heart of downtown.
For the rest of the day, I only took photos of our trip through Macy’s, which of course, use to be Marshall Fields.
A very bundled up Summer humors me with a pose in front of the infamous Marshall Field sign.
Summer discovers Franco candy at Macy’s, and…
…makes a purchase. She even bought me rum balls. Yummy!
We made it to several more stores before Apryl finished up at school and was able to meet us downtown for some Giordano’s pizza dinner. And as every reader here knows, Giordano’s stuffed pizza is our favorite!
The next day, we all headed to Chinatown for some lunch. However, after lunch, Apryl got sick so I won’t even bother to post the photo of the restaurant we ate at. Only, I doubt that we will ever be going back.
Apryl and the Nine Dragon Wall.
And here is some odd advertisement at the train stop:
I could just imagine the type of local news attention this would get in Memphis.
The next day we took the long train/bus trek over to The Museum of Science and Industry to check out the Body Worlds 2 exhibit. Since there was no photography allowed inside, I will just give you this photo of Summer and Apryl about to enter (exciting, huh?):
I’m not even going to try to explain this exhibit. If you are unaware of it, please click on the link above and make every attempt to see it before it closes.
Body Worlds 2 (which I kept trying to call Body Works that whole day for some reason) pretty much took up all our time at the Museum. It may be a cliche to say, but you really need a couple of days to see everything here. However, there was this amazing train model that represented downtown Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. But instead of the typical freight trains, these were the L trains and the Metro. The CTA trains even made their stops!
So, there you go. A few photos from Summer’s visit. We also went out to eat in the India district on Devon Street, which was fun, but we were all to cold to do too much sightseeing afterwards. The last night we ate at one of 24 hour Mexician restaurants, and were accused of not paying for a side dish of guacamole dip that we never got. Perhaps, I’m leaving all the best stories out.
As I said, it’s a shame that Apryl was so busy with school that she wasn’t able to spend that much time with her friend. Still, Summer and I had a good time hanging out. She was a very relaxed guest. Hopefully, she will be able to come back when we all have more free time.
