summercomfort | Pictures of recent travels

Otherwise known as "I finally sorted and uploaded photos!"

12/12 weekend -- Mom and I go to Chicago for Chinese teachers conference.

Here Mom is being all cute and excited about the snow and the cold (it was 10 degrees out, iirc). That scarf she's wearing is older than me.

I sneak out of the conference and hang out downtown.

Here's the Millenium Bean. It's pretty awesome.

I can rant about why I like it so much as a piece of artwork -- it lets us engage with itself, with the Chicago cityscape, and with ourselves... Can you spot me in the reflections?

Then I went to the Art Institute and stumbled upon a totally awesome exhibit of their 70 tapestries that they just spent 13 years fixing in some workshop in France. SEVENTY. yes.

Close up:

12/22-27 -- After Finals, Jono and I spent Christmas w/ Jono's family... in Chicago
I don't have any Jono-family pictures here, but they were really sweet. It was my first real Christmas spent with people who actually celebrate it regularly!

For starters, there was a Christmas tree! That wasn't made out of plastic and wire!

And we got to put cool birds and nests on it, and instead of tinsel we had branches of holly and silver icicles...

Total swankitude!

There was a boarded up window in the living room, so under Rene's suggestion, I attempted to paint a winter scene.

Al was Catholic, so we went to midnight mass.

I was impressed with how swift the wafer-eating part went. The priest gave it to 3 people, who then gave it to the rest of the congregation. Everyone was very orderly. The back row started first and they just got in a line, walked up, and did the whole wafer and blessing thing. And I really liked the part where everyone shook hands and said "Peace be with you."

The next day, Jono and I went to the Chicago History Museum. I went crazy and took 150 photos. Jono teased me saying that I was taking the whole museum home with me. Well... yeah. It's a HISTORY museum. I happen to be a HISTORY teacher.

But highlights:

A whole gallery of diaramas of Chicago history

Info about the Columbian Expo of 1892 and the Chicago World Fair of 1933

Part of the Midway Plaisance area that had all the different cultures of the world.

There was a meat-packing exhibit that involved spam.

Jono collected a lot of info for his Spirit of the Century rpg that he's running on Saturday nights.

I found out Johnny Torrio is the bomb.

And so that was Chicago.

The weather was really weird while we were there. But you know that already.

1/18-21: We visit Jono's extended-family relatives in Connecticut.

There was a nuclear power plant across the waters. I was disappointed with its non-nuclear-silhouette

Everyone there lived in big old houses. And the roads were obvious old cow/Indian-paths

We went to Mystic Aquarium, where we saw some cool upside-down jellyfish trying to be anemone:

And we saw vending machines where you take the water from baluga-whale crotch:

We were only in Boston for 2 hours, but we met up with my uncle, and the walked around Boston Commons, and then we followed the Freedom trail to a graveyard

Where we saw the tombstone of Paul Revere

And one erected for John Hancock.

I guess that's it for what's on my camera! Well, a few more at the actual flickr page.

Now I'm just mostly glad to not have to fly anywhere soon.