Friday started off nice and lazy - we needed it! We slept late for the first time since we got here and only left our room to get a dunkin donuts breakfast after 10.30. We had a long plan of what we wanted to do during the day before our dinner cruise in the evening.
We started off on a long walk to the Field Museum of Chicago. We stopped off at a free expo called Wired NextFest. It was so cool - they have a whole lot of the coolest technology innovation stuff. Like a spider suit... the material turns hard on impact... I know - super amazing stuff. The best part was it was totally free! We just stumbled accross it and walked in. This was a talking robot that uses AI - his name is Kenzo. He responds and has different facial expressions.
So we finally go to the field museum - it was HUGE! It makes our beloved Durban Museum look like a baby museum. This one has many exhibits, some of which are temporary, like the Nature Unleashed one that we went to. The museum has an incredible ancient egyptian collection with mummies and numerous artifacts. This is Sue - the museum's 90% complete dinosaur fossil.
The evolving planet was an excellent display of the history of our planet from the start to present day. We ended up spending more than 3 hours there and had to give the planetarium a skip, so that we could walk back and get ready for our dinner cruise.
The cruise began at Navy Pier and we managed to find a free trolley bus from the next street to take us there.
Thats the boat ...
We boarded the Spirit of Chicago just before 7pm and enjoyed a fantastic dinner. The view from the boat is unbelievable! I think Prean and I were the only ones that noticed though. The price of the ticket included dinner and drinks... so you can imagine there wereloads of student types - getting as drunk as possible. We felt out of place at first, but we had a great time watching all the people. There were many Chuck types (i.e. Geeky IT guys, with weird dance moves and who managed to find a pretty date for the evening). Prean and I were really surprised at how intergrated all the people are. There are people from every race here in Chicago and yet everyone just gets along. It's not like a black group or an indian group like we have in SA. At the cruise I think the common link was that all the students wanted to drink as much possible! LOL, we had fun people watching and watching how people have a party in Chicago. There was also a great fireworks display (which I think only Prean and I noticed).
So now we're nearly off to Italy for a month. We'll be in transit for another 24 hours... :-(
