Hello from Chicago – First Impressions

So here I am again, on another short excursion away from home. I’ve been awake for an hour now and decided that the best thing to do is get up and put my first impressions on paper. Since there’s only an hour difference between Toronto and Chicago, I decided yesterday that I wasn’t even going to change my watch. So when I went downstairs this morning to use the free computer at the Arlington Youth Hostel in Chicago, I realized it wasn’t 7am, but only 6am. Well, even better, that will give me more opportunity to explore.

A trip to Chicago has been in the works for a while. I’ve been here twice before, once in 2001 with 3 of my friends, and once in April 2003 to meet up with my friend Linda, who I’ve known from home in Austria since we were 10 years old. You know you’re getting old when you can tell someone you’ve known them for 30 years…

So Linda, who now lives in Indiana, and I decided to meet again in Chicago, so she plans to come today at 10:25 with the South Shore Railroad. I instead decided to fly this time, instead of driving or taking the train (15 hours from Toronto!!!) like I did the last two times.

As I have already done several times this year on my trips to New York City and Vancouver/Victoria, I decided to use my Airmiles to come to Chicago on a free flight, and it was a great decision since the flight is just more than one hour long. With the help of Airmiles, this is shaping up to be a really reasonable and cost-effective weekend getaway in a big city that will allow me to keep my costs as low as possible.

Yesterday I left Pearson International Airport at 4:45 pm and arrived at 5:30 Chicago time. Chicago O’Hare Airport is the busiest airport in the world and judging by the size of the terminals, I can only compete. After walking what seemed like miles, I reached the level where the subway trains leave and bought a 3-day visitor ticket for US$12.00. Chicago, like New York City, has a great transit system, with a large network of interconnected buses, subways, and elevated trains. I am fascinated by the “el-train” system that runs through the center of the city and the “Loop”, as it is called. The stilt train has been around since the early 20th century and allows you to see some of the beautiful architecture that Chicago has to offer.

My destination was the Arlington House Youth Hostel, a place I had already stayed at on my previous two trips. At US$56.00 per night for a private room for 2 people (albeit with a shared bathroom), you can’t beat the price. The Arlington House is located in the beautiful Lincoln Park neighborhood and literally only 15 minutes from downtown by train or bus. It took me 45 minutes by train to get to Washington Station downtown, where I changed to the Red Line, which took 10-15 minutes to get to Fullerton.

I’m usually pretty proud of my ‘highly developed sense of direction’, but by the time I got out of the Fullerton train station it was already dark and I soon ended up walking west on Fullerton, in the opposite direction of where I was supposed to. go. . I was able to successfully delay my arrival at the youth hostel by about 45 minutes due to walking in the wrong direction and not being able to connect with anyone who knew where the youth hostel is. None of the DePaul college students I asked had any idea where the intersection of Lincoln and Fullerton was, they were probably all new to town. I finally got to the next bigger intersection “Ashland” and realized that I had walked about 2-3 km to the west, in the wrong direction.

Pretty tired from rolling my suitcase, I decided to take the bus back east into Fullerton and arrived at Arlington House shortly after. The Arlington House, with its grand entrance hall packed with young (and old) travelers and utterly spartan rooms (no closets, no nightstands, no table lamps, no chairs, no desks, just a metal bunk bed for our private room) is always an experience. But I love it, it makes me feel young again hanging out with all these world travelers and adventurers of different ages.

I had originally planned to go downtown, but due to my detour I was pretty screwed up and decided to go eat something local. I walked south on Clark Street, which has many small, lively restaurants, and dropped into a place called Ranalli’s where I dined on extremely hearty soup, salad, and tiramisu. After all this running around, it was nice to sit down, read the newspaper, including the events calendar, and try to figure out what adventures might be in store for this weekend.

I woke up early today, actually an hour earlier than I thought, as I want to explore a bit before my friend Linda arrives in town. I plan to meet her at 10:25 at the Randolph Street train station, so I have a few hours to explore before she hits the city.

You could take a bus north, or go south to Old Town near North Street.

it will be interesting…