Day 5 The Field and The Bean

Once upon a time there was a lush green field and it grew a precious jewel of a bean, but this isn't the story in Chicago. We walked to Millennium Park which was an incredible green space to take our request tourist Bean pictures. We took a zillion, here is the one I like of the girls being exactly their age. Not sure why I try to get them to look the same direction every time but I can't help it. I love a perpetual challenge I suppose.




Afterwards we had a couple Chicago dogs and Strawberry Limeade and strolled through the rest of the park down to Museum Campus.




Just as a light sprinkle was threatening to start we popped into The Field Museum of Natural History. It was a nice museum, however I will lay it on the table that I don't care much for museums of old stuff dug up or ultimately stolen from a native group of people out on display as our, white people, way of repenting for the atrocities of yesteryear. It also is lost on me the thrill of seeing dead stuffed animals lined up behind glass, to me a magnificent museum is filled with art. Art is the truest reflection of the human spirit and it touches me to the depth of my soul when I look at a giant oil painting that looks so real and intricate that you can imagine the drop of sweat the painter dripped on the edge while creating it. You can almost smell the effort and passion that is shaped out of stone. That to me is worth admiring, so now that that is all out there, The Field was a nice museum not as nice the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan but still a nice museum.




We purchased the City Pass we hope to make good use of it in the next couple of days. Just at The Field it was worth it because apparently they nickel and dime you normally for a series of special exhibits.




One of them being the underground adventure which was sort of neat because you had to walk through a couple of rooms with funky mirrors which were supposed to represent you shrinking to tiny size which I think Lydia was a little worried about until she realized that we had not actually shrunk.




These pictures are contraband because not only are they additional charged exhibits but no pictures can be taken. However I took the calculated chance with no flash to capture this iridescent moment.




My favorite areas was the exhibit on Senegal where I learned there are no jungles in Africa and I liked a good portion of the Americas because they has a lot of cool looking totem polls.




We hopped a cab back and rested for a short bit before we had dinner at the rainforest café which I have to say was really cool for kids. We wore frog hats, had a rainforest scavenger hunt, sat next to an aquarium where every fish was named Nemo and every time someone ordered a specific dessert the servers would parade out and scream VOLCANO! It may seem nutty and it was, but Lydia loved it! She ate a good portion of her dinner in that chaos which was a delightful surprise. Afterwards the girls fell asleep on the walk home and we strolled down the Magnificent Mile for some casual window shopping.




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