Judy's Postcards: Chicago

After our few days in Switzerland we flew to Chicago and arrived there late in the afternoon and spent several hours in a long queue waiting to go through Immigration.
Finally we reached the end of the queue and were called up to the booth by a very grumpy official who fingerprinted, thumb printed and photographed us, stamped our passports and then grumpily said goodbye. No welcome to America.

We took a shuttle bus into the city and our hotel which was located beside the river and we had a lovely view of the river and the city skyscrapers which looked beautiful lit up at night.

We fell in love with Chicago. It has lovely wide tree lined streets with rows of flower beds brimming with beautiful colourful blooms.

The city is clean, the people are very friendly and helpful. Someone would always come up to us if we were looking at a map to ask if we needed help. We didnt see any graffiti. The river is lovely and there is a lovely riverside walk with cafes, bars and restaurants where you can dine overlooking the river.
There are river tours and river taxis and you can also hire a small boat on the river.

We had a two day hop on hop off bus ticket which we used to take us to all the sights. Millenium Park is beautiful and in the middle is the silver Cloud Gate sculpture, known as the Bean. where crowds of people have their photo taken in front of the reflective surface.

Navy Pier has the Childrens museum. It is located on Lake Michigan and you can take a cruise on Lake Michigan from there.

Magnificent Mile is the famous shopping area and all the big brands are there. It's nice just to walk along and window shop.

You can go to the top of Willis Tower for fabulous views and walk out on the skydeck. It was for a while the tallest building in the world but the Burj al Kaliffa in Dubai now has that title. The locals will tell you it is Seers Tower but spelt Willis. We ran out of time to go there.

We had 3 days in Chicago and that was definately not enough time to see everything. There are so many museums, science museum, planetarium, Shedd aquarium and others. We didnt get to any of them.