My trip to Chicago

This week has been rather busy for me. So I had the pleasure of traveling to Chicago for the very first time and, although I was only there for three days, I had much fun and thought I'd (once again) share some pics. I was there for work, and was attending the United Way of America's Financial Stability conference (I don't work for United Way but do work with their staff on several initiatives, anyway...). The conference was really good but the days were pretty full so I didn't get to explore the city much - my hotel was at the top of Michigan Ave so that's pretty much the area I stuck too. However not to worry as I will be back in Chicago in August for another conference. One thing I will say about Chicago is that it is quite the humid city and I, for one, did not fare so well. It made me rather uncomfortable and meant that if I was outside for more than five minutes I would sweat profusely - which may be an over share but what are you going to do (incidentally this uncomfort was not helped by sitting on the runway for 45 minutes on the way home with no air conditioning - it was a tad unpleasant to say the least). Anyway even about sweat, onto the pictures!!!

Some cool building by my hotel

Some cool statue by my hotel - it's the building in the background(as you may be able to guess I did not spend much time figuring out what things were!)

The same cool building/statue area at night

The view for my hotel room window - it overlooked the Chicago river and the cool building/statue area.

So on the second evening we were there, an evening reception was held. The theme of the conference was Financial Stability which is one of the core principles of United Way's "Live United" campaign, which encourages communities and individuals to give, advocate and volunteer. Anywho we got some free t-shirts to wear the event and here I am with some people I work with - Kori, Bill and Jerilyn.

The reception was held at Millennium park which is pretty awesome and had this big sculpture in it, which I believe is called something like 'Dream Believe' (edit - it's actually called 'Cloud Gate' - I wasn't even close!!!), but it looks like a rather shiny, big jellybean to me.

This pic is underneath to arch of the jellybean and I am sure is a very popular picture - but I still think it's mighty neat.

Also is the park was a cool fountain thingamy. It apparently features the faces of Chicagoans (is that even correct) and spays a bunch of water - which let me tell you was rather tempting in all that humidity.

So that's the trip in a nutshell - I also had some Chicago deep dish pizza - which was tasty and nearly went to a Cubs game but bowed out as I was super tired. Maybe next time, like I mentioned I am back in August - so who knows! Also the keynote speaker was Barbara Ehrenreich who wrote Nickel and Dimed (the book I just read) and a bunch of other books. Her address was so interesting, as is her book (if you have never read it I would thoroughly recommend it - it's about her experiences living on minimum wage in the US - so interesting).