Wanderlust: Day 19

Day 19 – Another cold day….nice and warm in our room but there is actually ice on the window frame! After breakfast we cab it to the Art Institute of Chicago. This place is amazing! A huge building, second biggest art gallery in America next to the Met in New York and the largest Impressionist collection in any one place outside of Europe…it was unbelievable! We started the day listening to a lecture on their current special exhibition then continued to ‘European Art before 1900’ (El Greco), American Folk Art, Impressionists, (Toulouse Lautrec, Monet etc), Modern American Art (American Gothic), Contemporary Art (1945 – 60) and Cont. Art after 1960 (Pollock, Warhol). We finished with the special exhibition, “Art and Appetite”. You would seriously need days to venture through this amazing gallery, it’s overwhelming.

Cab back to our hotel but he drops us on the corner so we head to “Eataly”, a new and amazing supermarket/bottle shop/restaurant just opened in Chicago the first week of December. What a concept! There are “Eatalys” in NY, which we didn’t sample, but this is amazing. Everything Italian from fresh produce, gelati, cakes, sweets, pasta, Italian kitchen equipment then upstairs it’s all restaurant where you can sit up at separate bars or at an area that is spread out with table and chairs. We prop ourselves up at a bar and order meat, cheeses, seafood and wine.

Tonight we are off to the basketball, Chicago Bulls versus the Phoenix Suns. What a night! Talk about pump up the crowd…between the cheer girls, the tap dancers, the mascot, the competitions….not to mention the basket ballers … it was a good night! Oh….and the Bulls won J