Chicago 2

The city of Chicago has a wonderful variety of architecture, from the 1800's to the most modern. However, when I read more about some of the buildings on the Internet, I found that some of the most modern looking were at least 20 years old. These two buildings at the Marina were built in the late 70's and remodeled about 10 years ago. They look like corn on the cob. The upper part has 450 pie-shaped apartments, and the bottom has room for 450 cars.

We saw one that looked like a castle. It turned out to be the water building for the city, built more than 100 years ago. We walked on Michigan Av one day, looking at the people and stores. Susan got tired and rode in the stroller, then fell asleep, so she missed the castle. Her allegiance is changing from Dora to the Disney princesses, especially Cinderella. Silvia bought her some "princess" shoes in the Disney store.

We finished the day by going to Millennium Park. The picture of Susan with the purple shoes is taken under "Cloud Gate", a huge metal sculpture that looks like a drop of Mercury. Another thing we saw in the park was a changing display of glass bricks with pictures of people of Chicago. We saw it just a the light was going. There are places in the park for musical events, art displays, a prairie garden, a fountain, a bridge. It's a wonderful park. I was impressed by another park too, Grant. It contains several museums, gardens, a sculpture garden, a display of globes (similar to the horses in Amarillo). We didn't have time to visit the museums. I'll have to save that for another time, but we walked in the park and gardens. The first thing we saw was a huge sculpture called "Agora". It consists of figures without heads or arms and larger than life size. I don't know how many there were, probably 100. We liked the globes. They have been painted and decorated with the theme of green Earth. We took a water taxi from that end of the park to Navy Pier, an amusement park.



In front of the Children's Museum was another small park. Some little girls were in their bathing suits playing in the fountain. There were mosaic areas depicting the ocean and Chicago history. I liked best the life-sized figures of children playing 'crack the whip'.