I stayed in Chicago a while, hoping to let my knees heal up. The highlights were as follows:
First, the bad. Some kind of rash appeared on my face, reminiscent of chicken pox. Combined with the fever and joint pains, I think this was just a really mild instance of shingles, otherwise known as "revenge of the chicken pox" where the dormant virus decides to become active again. Unfortunately, ever since I got Chikungunya in Puerto Rico, joint pains and body aches from any infection are magnified, which might have contributed to the knee pain. Once my knees were inflamed, I think I caused actual damage by using them anyway, especially going from relaxing in Urbana to an all-day ride. My time in Chicago was not enough for a full recovery, but I was anxious about getting on with my trip and left anyway.
Second, the mediocre. Pete tried to take me on a tour of Chicago foods, which I was a little conflicted about. I've been eating vegetarian when reasonable options were available, but I don't think vegetables appear in the Chicago diet. I had a slice of Chicago deep-dish pizza, realized that the significance of the dish was just that it contained more cheese and meat than normal pizza, and felt reaffirmed that vegetarianism was going to be better for me in the long run. Apparently you can get gluten-free crust, though, if you're into that. They just make the pizza on a giant meat patty instead of pizza dough. It's like a gigantic, poorly-layered lasagna undiluted by something so boring as pasta. I didn't actually get to the other pieces of the Chicago trifecta, the Chicago hot dog and the Italian beef sandwich, because I felt like I understood the goal of Chicago cuisine pretty well already.
Finally, the good. I tried several flights of beer with Pete, but I think I'll need a few more before I can start pretending to have sophisticated opinions about local beer again. I met Pete's sister and her family and tried to run a game of Mysterium with them, only realizing halfway through that the set they had was "inspired by" the original Polish version that I knew. Pete had little sympathy for my struggles with the game until he ran the next instance.
My favorite scene from Chicago occurred here. Some background: Amazon makes a cylindrical device named Alexa. Alexa has no buttons. Once Alexa is plugged in and set up, you can yell at it (her?) from anywhere and ask it to do things, like Siri or Google. I notice that every device made to be yelled at is personified as female, but that's beside the point for now. Pete asked Alexa to play some Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it complied. I was surprised at how loud it could get, so Pete asked it to turn up to 10. It complied. Unfortunately, this also meant it was now jamming the one communication channel we had with it, and it couldn't hear us asking it to turn down. Pete's a big guy and can yell pretty loud, so it was really entertaining for me to watch him holding a futuristic black cylinder, yelling as loud as possible directly at it while it kept obliviously blasting away, happily complying with the last command it understood. The future is now.
I intended to meet up with a few other friends while in town, but I spent most of my time convalescing at Pete's place. I did manage to meet up with a woman I met on RAGBRAI and attend an improv show at the IO Theater together, which was great. We had tickets to a show-and-tell event, where periodically the players accepted questions from the audience, all eight of us, about what was going on behind the scenes like how they decided when to cut or where certain ideas came from. This was really interesting and apparently we asked good questions, because the owner of the theater rewarded us all with free VIP tickets. I guess that means I have to go back sometime. We spent the rest of that night talking to a couple other guests and some of the players before getting drinks elsewhere. We discussed things from social anxiety to feminism to her mom's chickens. She had to rescue a rooster the next day, which would definitely have made the blog if I got to participate. Oh, and she had a concert ukulele that I got to play, which made me very happy.
I very nearly left Chicago by taking a train back to Urbana and calling it quits, but I decided to stick it out through the pain and left for Indiana after a few days at Pete's. I would've stayed longer, but I could only stand so much reality TV.
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