The biggest learning from walking the streets of Chicago has been to look up at every opportunity. Unfortunately my gait of walking with my head down, pigeon-toed and round-shouldered hasn’t prepared me for what lies above in this great city. Often Lynda has stopped and said, “Oh my God” which is the signal to look up and there has been another architectural masterpiece to bear witness to. It’s all been too much so tomorrow we are going on the much vaunted architectural boat tour which will give us the history and insights we are craving.

We started the day on what’s called the “Magnificent Mile” on Michigan Ave. It’s called that because of the architecture and yesterday there was a fine art festival that complimented it. After browsing the tents we took off down Michigan Ave for one last look at Millennium Park. Couldn’t help ourselves such is the gravitational pull towards it.

There’s been a number of occasions in our travels where we have got lost and walked an inordinate number of excess kms for no reason. Sometimes we have found ourselves in “prickly” places, to quote the bus driver in Portland, but mostly it’s turned out an exhausting but uplifting experience. A couple of hairy ones I can remember would be getting off the wrong subway stop in Harlem, feeling decidedly uneasy and immediately grabbing a cab. In a Dublin project housing estate where the standard dress code was tracksuit pants and prison neck tatts, a group of boys outside a shop threw a couple of items of trash at me and hit me on the back of the head. When I turned around to confront them they were completely undeterred and talking to each other as though nothing happened. Masterful method acting and I had to laugh as they wouldn’t have been any older than 10.

Yesterday we got our directions muddled and ended up walking through sections of Chicago that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. That’s the benefit of poor orienteering skills. One thing that would have been handy is those large maps some cities have on street corners. The “you are here” maps. You only need the map to show you the surrounding couple of kms but at least it reaffirms your position. Not everyone has Google Maps, particularly like us who have no interweb unless we are in a shop somewhere. The free maps you get in most cities just don’t cut it now.

Anyway, we finally made it to the Northside Food Festival which as it sounds happens in a park on the trendy Northside of Chicago about a km and a half from the CBD. It wasn’t what we expected in terms of the advertising. There wasn’t a lot of diversity in the food options and although it was a friendly atmosphere it didn’t deliver on the music either. We were hoping for some blues at the very least given Chicago’s stature in this genre. Instead, there was a corn-fed, apple pie eating white bread band who were more suited to a fraternity party. They played two token songs from the biggest Chicago movies of all time, The Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off just to feel relevant but when they started on a Rick Astley number we were outta there! The crowd was full of “All American” men and woman. College educated, beautiful to look at, a baby in a pram and a dog in tow. We were decidedly out of place. Lynda was clearly disappointed that we weren’t going to see some blues being played and we were both tired and disheveled.

Never one to chuck in the towel, I willed one last effort from Lynda and promised that we could go to The House of Blues. Another 40 min walk and we were there. We walked straight in to welcoming faces, went straight to the bar, grabbed some homemade lemonade and sat and listened to a man with a Fender Stratocaster on stage. He was a local in his late 40s and he played mainly old standards in a very “cruisy” style which is just what we needed. The venue itself is extraordinary. There’s very little space that has either been painted with artwork or covered in sculptures. It’s a deep-south Louisiana swamp voodoo style of décor and there is a restaurant band room where we were and a huge venue upstairs. We stayed for a couple of hours and took some photos in fading light of this city’s incredible buildings on the way home.

Slept like a log last night so today we are going to the Museum of Contemporary Art and then off to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs play St Louis Cardinals tonight. The Museum has an exhibition from Japanese legend Tukashi Murakami. We saw an exhibition of his in Tokyo called the “500 Ah Hats” which blew us away so no doubt this will be a similar explosion of colour and ingenuity. Here are some photos from yesterday.