the dawn of my vacation

tomorrow at 17:35 pm my plane will bring me back home, so this is my last post from chicago.
i got plenty more pics and videos, so don't think I'll finish this blog, it's just the last post right out of the town.

on sunday we didn't have any plans what to do, so we went to lincoln park to hang around; there we found the Lincoln Park Zoo, where you don't have to pay anything to get in, so we thought 'cool' and went through this zoo to realize, it's just a horrible place...
animals like Giraffes are held in a small room of about 5x10 metres, bears were behaving like they where total autistic, it was just completely insane!
qite a bad place, so we just left without seeing the rest.

The next yay we met Boris and Viola, friends of my sister who live in Idaho and spent some days in chicago to visit boris' parents; so they know the city pretty good and drove us to the lake michigan and told us a bit about the city.
Then they invited us to a Barbecue at their parents place, which was pretty cool, as they got tons to eat and a really impressive house.
in the evening they took us to a little Jazz Club (Green Mill) which is said to be
one of Al Capone's former favorite Clubs;
we saw a really great concert of patricia barber there but after a while we got pretty tired (not because of her but of the exhausting day) so we went home.

On Tuesday we went to the Chicago Art Institute where you can find an truely impressive collection of artists like Monet, Picasso, munch, pollock, el greco and many more, a quite nice little collection of photography and some historical art treasures like old japanese sculptures or egyptian stuff; sadly this place was so horrible mixed up, it was damn hard to find anything

afterwards we met Boris and Viola in Millenium Park, a pretty fun place they created -yeah right- at the millenium,
they got two big cuboids with moving faces there, shooting water fountains out of there mouth....not too easy to describe but really fun to watch the kids playing in the water there.
they also got a really big mirroring sculpture that's somehow a mathematical form, looking like a bean.
it's a pretty cool object because when you go through it, you get a weird psychedelic view in a mirrored chaos.

while waiting for my sister there, it suddenly began extremely hard to rain so we had to escape to the toilets waiting there till it ends;
after that didn't took too long, boris guided us through some of the architectural highlights of Downtown.

in the evening my sister and i went to a little club to watch some kind of a experimental modern jazz concert, starring the guitarist of Tortoise, a well known american instrumental band; it was quite nice of course, but like everytime when we had a exhausing day like this we were too tired to stay for too long.

next time I'll post from Vienna, so I thank you all for observing my vacation.
the total picture outpost is expected to happen during the next 14 days so stay tuned!

You've read the story, now watch the pics

Hi! got only very little time today but as promised, i'm uploading some pics now but as it would take too long to edit my pics and then upload them, i'll only upload pics taken from my sister and add my stuff another time (actually she took them on the same places as i did, so id doesn't really matter)

the pics are a bit mixed up, but i thing you'll get the idea...
i hope I'll find some time ti upload more pics during the next few days...

gogochicago reaches its destination!

gogochicago finally reached its destination!
As this library forbids me to upload any pictures onto the PC I'll post them the net time i pass by the other library (hopefully its possible there becdause i shot plenty of nice pics!

so where to begin...we arrived on thursday at about 3 am at our Hostel, 3 hours later than expected; (due to bad weather conditions our flight had been delayed)
the hostel is very nice, clean, many friendly people around and it's location is pretty good.
first we found a very nice little student cafe just two streets away from the hostel
(there are some universities around, so there are many young people and some bars and cafes near) which is now our fiorst choice for breakfast, as you get amazing delicious sandwiches there.
sadly the coffee in america is like water; the only way to get a coffee that's about as strong as vienna coffe is to order a espresso doppio and it took us a few trys through the menu till we finally found out ;)
we spent the whole day with exploring the streets, running around till we didn't feel our feet anymore and wasting far too much money;
the weather switched between rain and sunshine but at last, the sunshine reigned and it kept sunny till today.

yesterday we went to the Museum for Contemporary Art to see some pretty nice exhibitions from photo and comic artists and from andy warhol too;
afterwards we went to the John Hancock Centre, which is about the 2nd largest building of chicago and you can go up to the 95th floor (!!); quite breathtaking;
the highest floor I've ever been before was the 42nd in Hong Kong and this was twice as high!
You'll love the pics I took there; they seem to be taken right out of the window of an airplane...

In the evening we went by metro to a very youth dominated district; the streets are looking so cool there; walls are covered with graffitis, the houses are pretty old, a bit fucked up, but not too dirty and you can find very good record-, comic- or book stores everywhere; they have opened till 10 pm or later so afterwards you can go stright to the next bar and have a drink.
It remembered me of the 5th district of vienna which is has similar kind of cityscape.

I'll post the pics as soon as possible, but please stay patient as i can't stay in libraries all the time :)

ah and finally i reactivated the comments, of some strange reason they were activated....so....you know what to do.....COMMENTATE!

Preparing for take off

this time I finally got a pic of my ol grandma; isn't she a real beauty even in the age of 89 years?

I also took some pics of a Walmart, one of the biggest supermarkets out here; it's so big, it takes you about 15 minutes to go from one side to another, like a hanger used for airplanes.
It's truely crazy there because you can find everything in this place; like food, furniture, electronics, clothes and so on; they even have little cars mostly used by overweighted people so they don't have to run all the way through the mart.

sadly I still haven't seen any alligators here, in general, animals have been banished from these lands to make this environment more human-friendly; quite stupid way to treat this place, which has formerly been like a jungle and is now as artificial as an resort.

maybe my next post will be from chicago, on wednesday I'll go there and I don't know if I'll post any blog before leaving florida (and I don't really know if i need to post anything else, because there's not too much going on here ;) )

PS: posting comments doesn't seem to work at the moment, drop a mail ( val.htk@gmail.com ) or just keep trying again if you need to tell me something, sorry anyway, but it's a problem with blogger, i guess...

beach'd

this time I'm posting some pics straight from the beach;
as you can see, it's not as crowded as you may expect when thinking about the beach of florida, but on the other hand, there aren't any rocks so you can forget diving there as you won't see anything but sand.

after feeding one of those herons once, we now get visits from the whole family everey evening;
pretty funny and very big birds (aprox. 1m or more) they are and very patient as they can wait for hours peeking through the window and hoping to get some food.
unfortunately, the humans have totally banished the aligators from here, about 12 years ago, when I've been here, they where everywhere.

Florida is the only state ion america, where cars don't have to be testet if they're roadworthy or not, so you see pretty crazy things moving over the streets....many oldtimers and totally crashed wrecks; it's kinda stupid, but of course fun tough.

Finally the first blog entry...

After trying to blog on monday but suffering on disabled cookies, I'm now in another library where it's finally possible to post to blogger.

on the first day, we arrived in sarasota/fl and got the first bad message: our luggage didn't make it on our plane so it had to be sent to our house in florida on the next day. Far worse was the fact, that I came down with a cold on the flight, so i had to stay in bed for the first days (that's why i didn't write anything for so long...)
now that i'm back on track again, i can finally go to the beach (didn't shoot any pics yet, because i'm to afraid someone would steal my cam on the beach, but sooner or later I'm gonne take it with me when goning there...)

in general it's not as boring as i expected here (at least i completed 'the da vinci code', a book with over 600 pages, in 5 days...) people here are faaaar more friendly then the picture, european people may have about americans, describes them to be and yesterday i took an old (very old...) bike out of the garage of my grandma's house and drove through the streets, where every house looks the same; but in the orange colored evening' it was a nice ride anyway.

next time i'll post some crazy pics of one of those super-sized supermarkets, which is as big as a small town and where you hardly can find anything smaller than XXL...