Work trip to Chicago, USA - 10th to 14th December 2007

A chilly week in freezing Chicago for work, a city that most Americans seem to have only nice things to say about. I have often heard Chicago called "the typical American city", bearing in mind the fact that New York and Los Angeles are both a bit unusual in many ways. So, I was pretty excited to see what it was all about, until I read on Chicago's Wikipedia entry that one of its twin cities is Birmingham. Oh well, nowhere is perfect I suppose.

Arriving at O'Hare airport, I was very quickly reminded that Chicago has a huge Polish population (in fact having more Poles than any city in the world except Warsaw). If you think that the UK has a lot of Polish people, Chicago beats it hands down. In the airport, most of the staff were talking to each other in Polish, and it seemed that only the immigration people themselves spoke English routinely. At the taxi rank to get into town, pretty much every cab driver that pulled up, plus the despatcher, were speaking quickfire Polish, and we went past a number of big Polish churches on the way to my hotel.

The Chicago skyline is very impressive indeed, from the Sears Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world, to just an "average" skyscraper of 20 to 30 floors or so. There are big buildings everywhere, and that certainly gives the city a sense of importance. By contrast, the Chicago River, running through the city centre, is very small, reminiscent of the Singapore River in being a small river surrounded on both sides by very tall buildings. This even adds to the effect there, because when you are standing on a bridge over the river, surrounded by buildings, you feel very small indeed.

Chicago is also one of the only places I've ever been to that has the weird phenomenon of double decker streets (Hong Kong is another one, to some extent). These generally feature a lower level that carries through traffic, and a level above it, where you can see daylight, where all the traffic lights are. In much of the city centre, the double decker streets feature railways on the upper level. Seeing this, and thinking about it, it looked familiar from films (probably ones that feature Chicago), but it was a strange sight to see "El" trains running directly above the street.

To say it is extremely cold in Chicago at this time of year, is a massive understatement. For the 5 days I was there, the temperature never got above freezing, and the lows in the evenings were down as low as -10. Added to the wind chill in the "Windy City", and it could be bitterly cold indeed. I managed to miss the huge snowstorms that hit the north-east of the country at the same time, but it was more extreme weather than you get in Britain - even though we aren't exactly renowned for good weather, we don't seem to have crazy extremes like that.

As well as going to see The Lemonheads and some ice hockey, I of course spent some quality time eating typical gut busting Chicago food. Deep dish pizzas, big thick hotdogs, huge steaks and all sorts of other unhealthy stuff, made sure that my stomach was full, but they probably take a few years off your life. One particular highlight was a trip to a steakhouse, where there was a 48oz steak on offer, topped with a couple of lobster tails - all for $90, and the most unnecessarily over the top meal in the world. When they also point you towards their "family style" (i.e. massive, big enough for a family to share) portions of side dishes, you know that you aren't going to go hungry. I thought you could eat well in Philadelphia and New York, but the default in Chicago seems to be for huge amounts of gut-busting food. Brilliant for a week, but I'd imagine that it would get tiresome (or you would get fat) after a while.

With the amount of work I was doing, I didn't get as much time as I'd have liked to explore the city - and the visibility wasn't great, which made a trip up the Sears Tower rather pointless anyway. I did get to go out to the Wicker Park area of the city, which was full of cool shops, bars, restaurants and venues - rather like South Street in Philadelphia. The city centre was nice, although pretty business like, and I got the feeling that it emptied out quite a bit after 6pm, as everybody went back to their neighbourhoods. The shopping drag of North Michigan Avenue was entertaining for a (very cold) evening, walking past the Tiffany and Cartier shops, to get to the Apple shop for a play with their new toys.

All in all I had a good few days in Chicago - it was a nice city, with a real sense that you are in a big, important place. I have to say that I could easily live here, but at the same time, I don't really get why the Americans I know all seem to love the place so much. It is a good city, but lets not go overboard about just how good.