Traveling through the US - Chicago Part II (10/27 – 10/29/12)

This weekend I went on my second trip to Chicago with Jan, Jann and Jan’s mom Reinhild. We stayed at the same hotel like we did the last time. But instead of using the train to get into the city we took the car and hell, you have no idea how confusing the traffic system can be. Even with a GPS driving through the so called Spaghetti Bowl which connects three major expressways west of the loop is a challenge because the computer voice can’t talk fast enough to tell you where to go.

This time we took the chance to explore the city with the sightseeing bus routes and got an experience of the fairness of the American rights system. While the bus was heading to a stop, the street and bus lot was filled with other cars and our driver couldn’t move on. Behind us was a police car and after e few moments the lights of it start flashing and our driver was found guilty for blocking the traffic, even if there was a whole bus of eye witnesses that saw the truth and ensured that the bus driver could not move on. But anyway… I hope he didn’t got suit in the end.

During one of our nights we went up to a bar on top of the Hancock Tower. They didn’t charge us for the ride to the top, but of course the drinks are not the cheapest ones. Nevertheless, it was still worth it, the view over the hundreds of thousands of lights was quite amazing.

 

 

On Monday morning I had to head back to Omaha for my Data Mining class. Fortunately, Jan paid for a flight with Southwest Airlines, otherwise I would had to take the bus on Sunday already. The cool thing about the flight was, that I was in the first boarding group and because there are no seat reservations I got one in the first row with 1 meter of leg space :-)