From now on this great city on the grand lake maintains a special place in my heart. Anyone who has walked Chicago's magnificent streets on a beautiful summer day knows the feeling.
Certainly, the word demure doesn't hold currency here. Chicago! is about exclamations!! after all!!! It alternately excites and soothes.
Chicago is that rare and seemingly contradictory thing: it's particularly striking in its paradoxes. It is a coarse town - a blue-collar town of factories and manufacturing plants. And yet it is also an elegant city, witnesses most obviously by its stately, adventuruous architecture. It is a city that seduces you with both its purr and its roar. Unlike, say, New York, which simply overwhelmes you, or Toronto, which bewitches you.
You fall in love with Chicago gradually, mile by mile, a willing captive in the passenger seat, until that moment when you want to drive it. When that moment comes, and it will Chicago will no longer just look good - it will have left the showroom and be yours.
My acquaintance with Chicago begins on July, 4, 1998. And it begins with driving along Lake Shore Drive - with the unbelievably blue and clean lake Michigan on the right and downtown Chicago on the left. There are lots of sirens, horns, screeching of breaks. It's just a flood of cars, ahead and behind. It's like a movie being showed especially for me. During the day, Chicago's downtown is one of the most vibrant in America, and I feel the power of this city.
Then I drive back along the Michigan Avenue, looking out at the Magnificent Mile (very probably the finest stretch of architecture in the country). And I know that in a couple of minutes I'll be here, I'll be walking down this street and gazing in awe at the astonishing beauty of Chicago's fabled skyscrapers. The tall buildings serrate against the sky like a mountaine range, their peaks disappearing into thick, wet clouds.
At last I'm here, on the streets of downtown Chicago. Today is the 4th of July, and downtown is overcrowded with people. I hear lots of voices - bellowing, persuading, chatting, cajoling, arguing, in a word, communicating. The festival "Taste of Chicago" is on my way. I feel myself dragged into a stream of people going there. I feel helpless, I have to move with this stream. And I feel excited at the same time - I just don't care what the final destination of this stream is... I'm here! I'm in Chicago! Breathing Chicago's air, listening to Chicagoans talking, enjoying everything around me.
Later I find myself near the Buckingham Fountaine - Oh my God! It's gorgeous! It's amazing! It's beautiful! It's just unforgettable! But I don't know yet that this fountaine is only the beginning, only the tiny diamond in that huge crown of my love to Chicago.
Having admired the Buckingham Fountaine, I leave for the quay of the lake Michigan with boats tied up everywhere. I can't help taking a water taxi promising a breathtaking view of Chicago skyline. And it really is something! Soon I find myself bouncing impatiently on the deck back and forth and snapping my camera in all the directions. I learn from the story told aboard that in the language of some Indian tribe the word "Chicago" means "smelling onion"! What a funny thing a human language can be sometimes!
Being on board a boat, I feel a little cold. The lake is the lake, and I think I begin getting the idea why Chicago is known as Windy City...
Back to downtown I'm going to explore the Magnificent Mile. The Magnificent Mile is an international showcase of great design and style shimmering from the Chicago River to Lake Shore Drive. It is the very center of fashion and culture, service and hospitality, ambiance and elegance. Here, surrounded by the timeless beauty of some of the world's most famous architecture, the city's finest treasures are yours for the choosing.
Prestigious shops, fine restaurants, world-class hotels and important museums and galleries line Chicago's most outstandingly opulent avenue.
Chicago's most cherished landmark, the Historic Water Tower, marks the center of the Magnificent Mile. Surviving the city's greatest tragedy, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, this beloved structure was renovated and renamed Chicago's Historic Water Tower Visitor welcome center in 1994.
You're certain to experience extraordinary service, quality merchandise and a luxurious milieu as you explore shopping, dining, night life and cultural attractions found in the Magnificent Mile area, Chicago's crown jewel.
I poke my nose into the original Marshall Field's on State Street, an incredible department store with an ornate ceiling and escalators that crisscross like zippers up nine floors to the top.
Then I rush to the Bloomingdale's and browse for a while there before going to the downstairs and then to an Italian reataurant for a cup of coffee.
I sip my coffee and observe the panorama around me - luxury cars and horses in the street, Chicagoans in the restaurant. People around me are talking and taking non-stop. It occurs to me that if New York is the city that never sleeps, Chicago is the city that never shuts up.
The ethnic diversity that is Chicago is everywhere on my way. A jumble of nationalities, it is Chicago, and America, in microcosm. It's a great place to simply hang out and observe, which is what I do until I realize that it's getting darker.
So I hit the Sears Tower. It's a touristy thing to do, I know, but that doesn't seem reason enough not to take in the breathtaking panorama of perhaps America's greatest architecture from atop 103 stories, especially in the evening.
The talk up here is not as animated as it was down in the streets. It's less conversational, more an overlapping staccato of exclamations. But it fills the air with a mix of childlike glee and almost churchlike reverence, a polyglot of tongues - Chinese, Polish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, English, and who knows what else. People point at structures they recognize, and talk excitedly of having been there or wanting to go. Some just stay and stare without moving - shocked and overwhelmed by this beauty.
The effects in this movie are really amazing - you lie there and feel like being on board a spacecraft with a huge window. It's like Star Trek! When you're "flying" around the mountains, you feel giddy. And when you're watching that avalanche coming from the top of the mountains roght on you, you feel goosebumps - everything is so real and so unbelievably amazing!
Back to the lake shore before saying good-buy to Chicago - taking the last pictures of downtown and the lake itself, touching the water (waiting, actually, for some time to do that and then the wave comes and makes my both feet wet, but I manage to touch the water nevertheless) and grabbing a stone from the shore (not to forget about being here).
Who am I to argue?
Then I take my leave and head up to Ontario street with the Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood, Ed Debevic's restaurant and Michael Jordan's bar.
I stand at the giant windows, looking out at the Magnificent Mile and the city's long, pretty lakefront, which opens into that gentle sea of a lake Michigan. The streets and parks and houses that make up Chicago's famous quilt lie before me decorated with beads of lights. I see occasional fireworks in some places - it's the Independence Day, for Christ's sake!
The next day, the 5th of July, I spend in Chicago Museum of Science and Industry - admiring the Fairy Castle, Space Exhibit, enjoying the movie "Everest" in the OmniMax Theatre.
