This Is A Lake - A travel blog

(Cold update: still bloody cold.) After our walk around the Loop yesterday, today we focused on Near North, the area north of the Chicago river. We took the train down to Chicago station (I notice a naming pattern here) and took a walk down the Magnificent Mile, a commercial stretch of shops, department stores and malls along Michigan Avenue. The majority of shops, if not all of them, belong to multinational companies that you can find in any high street across the world, but really the interest on this walk isn’t so much the shopping as the architecture. It reminded me a bit of Omotesando, the upscale shopping avenue in Tokyo, which you can read more about on this very blog (twice!), in the sense that every building has its own unique architectural style: some are dignified early 20th century, some are slick 21st century, some are grandiose, some modern and understated... The only common theme is that most are enormous! The highlight of the walk is at the very Southern end of Michigan...

For the purposes of this entry, please imagine that every paragraph is prefaced by: it’s bloody cold in Chicago! The temperature hovered around 4°C, with sharp, chilly winds all day long, and not for nothing it’s been spring for a week now, just sayin’. Today we decided to start from the top and go to our #1 Chicago destination: the Art Institute of Chicago, the city’s premier art museum. It’s better to do these things at the beginning, when you’re still fresh, before the fatigue starts to carry over. After a long L ride downtown, we arrived in front of the classical building a few minutes before the doors opened, so instead of freezing to death in the queue we opted to duck into the shop of the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which is just a couple of doors down and opens earlier. It’s a fantastic little shop, part museum store, part design boutique, with lots of really tasteful and original Chicago-themed items. A far cry from tacky souvenir shops, but also priced accordingly, great...

I left sleepy Richmond, Virginia this morning, its airport a blessed 15 minute drive away, and began a long trip to my next destination, Chicago. There is actually a direct Richmond-to-Chicago flight, but it was prohibitively expensive, so I took a combination that had me connecting at New York’s LaGuardia airport. It should have been fine, but my first flight was delayed, which left me with a chilling 30 min layover in a New York airport not exactly famous for its efficiency. By some miracle of scheduling, though, I only had to walk a few gates to board my second flight, so in the end it all worked out! I landed in Chicago two hours and a half later, and took the train downtown. A kind man who was leaving the city gave me his train pass as I was trying to buy one! Thank you! The train on the blue line took a good 50 min to arrive downtown, giving me post-traumatic flashbacks of Paris, and afterwards I still had to take the L (short for elevated) train on the brown line to drop off my ...

Today it was rainy and cold, not particularly inviting for walking around, so I sought refuge indoors and spent the best part of the day going from one museum to another. First on the list was the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. Unbeknownst to me, Poe lived in Richmond and may even have written The Raven here. None of his known residences have survived; the museum occupies instead the oldest remaining house in Richmond. It is comprised of three or four tiny houses around a quiet manicured garden, insouciantly patrolled by two black cats, and each building displays objects that belonged to Poe or his relatives. The text beside each display did a great job of weaving in the story of his life and his works. There was so much I didn’t know: that he was an orphan and that he took the name Allan from his foster family, who nevertheless did not adopt him and left him out of the will; that despite his celebrity there are entire chunks of his life we know nothing about, most notably his unexplained dea...

Today, greeted with a sunny if rather chilly morning, I was left to my own devices, and so I took the chance to walk over to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I arrived shortly after they opened at 10:00, and I figured I could see the whole place at my leisure in a couple of hours, eat something and then do something else for the afternoon. Reader, I was wrong! I was shocked to find not only that the museum itself as well as its collection are enormous, but also that they have solid exhibits on about a dozen different themes. First I encountered a few rooms about European religious and Baroque paintings, which I don’t particularly care for, got my bearings on the map, and moved on to more interesting sections. Probably the most unexpected was a full collection of Fabergé jewellery, including his famous eggs but also cigarette cases, medallions, handles for canes and umbrellas, decorative flowers... It was a strangely familiar experience to be looking at Fabergé eggs in Richmond, Virgin...

My first day in Richmond, my first day of this trip, was cold but sunny. Ed, Sudha and RJ regaled me with a king’s breakfast (homemade pancakes included, forever grateful) and then we set off for our first adventure: Monticello, the retirement home and plantation of the 3rd US president, Thomas Jefferson. Monticello is about an hour’s drive away from Richmond, near the (now sadly infamous) town of Charlottesville, and although advance tickets had already sold out for the day, they do have a few walk-in tickets that you can buy on the spot. The site, built on top of a hill with ample views over the surrounding areas, features a visitor centre with exhibits and a café, several cabins and slave quarters, the Jefferson family cemetery and, of course, Jefferson’s mansion itself. It is a beautiful, modest structure that combines the red brick you might expect from New England colonial buildings with Greek columns and friezes. The columns and the peculiar octagonal dome are what gives the bui...

It’s time for my next adventure! I am going back to the United States, to keep exploring this enormous and diverse country! Over many different travels, I’ve been slowly crossing off states from the list: as of now I’ve been to New York, D.C., Massachusetts, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, California, Nevada, and Arizona. This time I am going to visit Richmond, Virginia, then I return to Chicago (I’ve been wanting to go back ever since I first visited as a kid), and then I’m crossing the country to see Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. It’s kind of the least efficient itinerary possible, please don’t judge me on that! But I’ve already done the big thematic chunks (the coasts, the south) so I sort of put this trip together based on where I know people and cities that I really want to visit. But for sure it’s going to be varied! I know I’ve given this advice on this blog before, but it bears repeating: if your long-haul plane has two floors,...