2009 in Chicago

We went to Chicago on January 1st 2009, because we needed to go and renew Georg's passport at the German Consulate and this is the closest one to us, so we decided to make a fun trip out of it. It was about a 6 hour drive, and then we stayed the night at the Inn of Chicago, chosen for its close proximity to the Consulate. It was also an early hotel in the 20's and has been redone, it was small, but nice enough.

We went to Hard Rock for dinner which was fabulous and enjoyed strolling through the streets of Chicago. We had it pretty much to ourselves, probably due to the fact that the night before there were rockin' parties bringing in the New Year. So we went out on the Pier as well overlooking the great lake and enjoyed a very cold, but romantic evening.

The next morning we walked briskly and made it to the Consulate as one of the first ones, we ended up chatting with all the other Germans and enjoyed our time, I made the joke that it was probably funny us all speaking English, instead of German, but they all said it was fine, "It doesn't matter what language you speak, as you are so nice." I thought that was sweet. There was a little baby there to get his German citizenship, since his mother is American and his father German, he already had his American citizenship. It was very cute. Well, everything went great except they wouldn't take any of Georg's passport pictures that we had gotten, we even had 3 different versions and none worked...our greatest concern of coming so far just to get a passport, but luckily they were really nice, rather the gal thought it was very funny how Georg kept pulling out pictures and none would work. Luckily we just had to walk a couple of blocks to the Walgreens where the lady there was very familiar with the German Consulate and how picky they are. :) She was so very nice and gave the pictures to us for free. He couldn't be smiling and his head had to be an exact size, even a picture that was on his last passport they said wouldn't work; so much for comparing that.

There we are standing by a statue made of the famous painting of the farming couple, the city, the Wicked Theatre. When we visited The Chicago Tribune building we really visited the World. If you look close and enlarge the picture you will see the different materials are from allover the World, we saw the Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China, the Alamo, a few castles, The Westminster Abbey, the church where Martin Luther posted his complaints of the church, etc. It was really neat.

Anyway, having our sole reason for coming out to Chicago taken care of, we went and checked out of our hotel and enjoyed the city. We walked around most of the city admiring it and went by the Wicked Theatre thinking of Mom, when we were needing to get on our way and leave the city, we decided to go to Barack Obama's neighborhood. Interesting to note that this was the day he and his family were coming back from Hawaii, well we drove down the street and not far from his home we saw driving in the opposite direction a caravan of police cars, and black suburbans with Secret Service looks to them, with ties on and sunglasses, well some of them. There was also an airport shuttle. We just barely must have missed them getting dropped off. Oh well, it was a beautiful neighborhood with one street the historic old homes and then on the next street some lower income housing, we thought it was a neat neighborhood, and as the news said, the street was baracaded and officers were everywhere, we even got stopped. It was neat just to see it all.