Today was my first day in Chicago.

We flew in last night, but today was my first official day.

I love it.  It is absolutely beautiful.  There are brick buildings everywhere, there are patches of snow on the ground, and for the first time in my life my excellent taste in winter fashion has a purpose. 

My parents are with me for a few days to get me settled, as I still have nowhere to live.  We’re staying in a hotel in downtown, so we did a little bit of exploring.  We mostly just walked around and tried to grasp the lay of the land.

Aside from self-discovery and anthropological research, the main reason I am here is to spend a semester studying comedy full time at Second City.  I saw the training center today.  I didn’t get too close, just flirted from a distance.  I will be entirely familiar with it soon enough, for now I’ll be coy.

 The eating tour of Chicago also began today, and I must highly recommend both establishments we ate at:

-Nookie’s

Nookie’s is a little café in Old Town.  It is fantastic.  They serve breakfast all day, and serve it right.  Rampant appetites at our breakfast table this morning lead my parents and I to order way more food then we should, but we still managed to make a lot of it disappear.  My mom was charmed by her Denver Omelet and my father thoroughly enjoyed his gravy, ham, and grits.  Personally, I feel that if a restaurant can convince someone they’ve enjoyed a pile of grits, they must be good.  Or hypnotists.  I had the king of breakfast: a sampler platter of assorted pancakes that follow in order of deliciousness:

1.)   Chocolate Chip Pancakes

2.)   Carrot Cake Pancakes

3.)   Bread Pudding Pancakes

4.)   Lemon Poppy Seed Pancakes

Aside from my hearty recommendation of their pancakes, let me also sing the praises of their coffee, which was the best coffee I’ve had in a very long time, and I drink a lot of coffee.

  

-Gino’s East

This Pizzeria is exactly what I wanted a Chicago pizzeria to be.  The walls are covered with beer logos and graffiti drawn and autographed by pizza fans.  The house salad dressing was delicious and the pizza was, of course, fantastic.  The one thing I was not expecting: the sauce was on top of the rest of the pizza.  I’m not sure if this is a Chicago thing, or was just that restaurant thing, or maybe they just do it to hide the spinach from kids on their Spinach and Cheese pizza.  I will have to collect more data to answer these questions.

 An Anthropological note I observed at Gino’s:

The whole place is completely covered, wall-to-wall, layer after layer of names and pictures and “so and so was here”s, except for the bathroom.  In the bathroom there were a half dozen paper signs that read “This is a no graffiti zone: please do not write on the bathroom walls” I was very impressed to see how quickly the Chicago natives got on board with this concept.  Not a single line was drawn on a wall, except for the several dozen hand written words that said “Ya! No writing on the walls!”  Chicagoans seem very community minded.