Chicago Saturday, Part 2: Pizza & Stuff

One trend on Instagram that kind of gets on my nerves is hashtags to commemorate vacations. Like #TheSmithsInSaskatoon or #RandomLifestyleBloggerInPalmSprings. I was thinking about what hashtag I would use if I was some Instagram try-hard and the only thing I could think of was #TheFuckSticksDoChicagoOnABlueCollarBudget

Seemed a bit long and clunky though.

It was somewhere in between lunch & dinner when we were toiling around Milennium Park. None of us were particularly starving yet but I made the executive decision that we should find somewhere to eat ASAP before any fuses got blown.

Some of us go from zero to KILLKILLKILL when it comes to feeding schedules. The ‘some of us’ that don’t have beards.

Henry determined that one of the famous (aren’t they all) deep dish joints was within walking distance so we set off into the unknowns of Chicago. Chooch and I were particularly fascinated/horrified every time we had to walk underneath a train thingie.

You know.

Those thingies.

Here in Pittsburgh, we have a fuck load of bridges. Honestly. If you take any tour here in the ‘Burgh, you will learn that Pittsburgh has the second most bridges of any city in the world but I can’t imagine this is true.

We do have a ton though, as well as tunnels, both of which I hate and have no choice but to travserse every single day in order to get to and from work.

That being said, I really enjoyed walking across this bridge in Chicago! And the river below didn’t make me clench as much as our gross rivers do.

I’m not sure what transpired internally from one side of the river to the next, but Chooch was a hornet after we crossed. So then I started to feed off that and shouted things like WE SHOULD HAVE LEFT YOU AT HOME WITH YOUR GRANDMOTHER THIS IS THE WORST TRIP I HATE EVERYTHING.

And then Henry accidentally hit him in the mouth (I swear—Chooch is supposed to be guest-blogging about this) when he was trying get something out of his pocket, and then Chooch started to cry out of shock and there were people walking toward us and all I could think was THIS IS 2017 NOW WE WILL HAVE OUR SON TAKEN AWAY AND WE’LL HAVE TO MOVE TO CHICAGO TO BE CLOSE TO THE ORPHANAGE.

But then everything was OK because we saw the restaurant up ahead—-and all of the hundreds of people waiting outside of it.

Even at 3pm there was a 90 minute wait. Nope.

So we found another “famous” deep dish place right up the street and the wait there was only 30 minutes but they sat us after about 5 – I think they were just trying to look cool, I dunno.

You guys, this place was so unmemorable to me that I had to Google “deep dish Chicago” and hope that the one we ate at looked familiar to me. Apparently, it was Gino’s.

Look, there was nothing bad about this place AT ALL. We had a great waitress who was very attentive (such as when Chooch banged his elbow off the table while ordering, she asked him if he was OK, which was more than Henry and I did because we didn’t even know anything happened), the beer selection was good (I think?), and the pizza was fine! But the thing is, we’re just not that wild about deep dish. Is that weird? I think it’s good, but I’m very picky with pizza and if we had deep dish in Pittsburgh I would probably skip it every time in favor of Giovanni’s and Fiori’s because I love that greasy thin crust/sweet sauce combo, yeah boi.

I liked that nearly every surface of the place was covered in customer graffiti. It made it feel wonderfully late-80s and that appealed to me. To be honest, I was still kind of annoyed even after we were seated, but then Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen” came on and all was right in my world again. And then Henry made it wrong when he said he was looking at my painting of Billy Ocean the other night when he was sitting at the computer and couldn’t for the life of him remember who it was supposed to be BECAUSE I’M A SHITTY ARTIST, SAY IT HENRY. SAY THE FUCKING WORDS.

We were originally sitting at a table but then a booth opened up right after we ordered so Henry asked if we could move and the waitress was like IDGAF and then lovingly called Chooch “Bub” or something—she only liked communicating with him and just gave Henry and me the dregs of her personality allotment. Which was fine! I WASN’T IN THE MOOD FOR SMALL TALK ANYWAY.

Seriously though, she was a good waitress.

I did like this pizza. The crust had a sweetness to it that reminded me of something from my childhood. One piece was enough for me though, jesus christ! That pizza sits like a brick in your stomach.

Mostly, we only ordered a small because we wanted to get ice cream or something afterward, because that’s what we do, OK? Some people go to a new city to see war memorials or art, we go for the ice cream. But then I realized that Firecakes was super close to where we just ate, and even though I’m not a big donut fanatic, I thought that maybe Chicago donuts could change my mind.

Yep, they did. 

We had a lot of Chicago calories to walk off, so we roamed around.  Chooch counted all the dogs he saw, imprinted on a bunch of geese, and fell down several steps at Trump Tower (more reason to hope that guest post comes to fruition). But the important thing to note is that since we were properly fed and sugared, we all got along wonderfully for the rest of the evening!

We went back to Millennium Park, pretended to be interested in the jazz festival for a few minutes only because Chooch had to use the bathroom, and then accidentally walked to Buckingham Fountain.

They were standing sort of like this on accident but then I made them do it more pronounced and then Chooch started crying because Henry stepped on his foot.

After this, we walked to get coffee at Goddess and the Baker (which I wrote about in the Firecakes link up above, because god forbid I should ever keep everything together in one nice, organized blog post), and almost immediately after that, the skies opened up and huge, fat rain drops fell out of nowhere. There wasn’t any rain in the forecast, so we  were like, “Is this a Chicago thing, or…?” Instead of taking the L back to Chinatown and having to walk another 4 blocks back to the hotel in the rain, we took a Lyft. Chooch was so excited about this. I don’t know why he gets so excited about Lyfts and Ubers. Our driver was an older man who took a phone call from his friend Joe. They talked about taking the helicopter out the next morning and if someone was still in Mexico, I don’t know the details because I stopped paying attention when my mom texted me about a TOP doll she found on eBay and asked me if I wanted it and I was like, “Please if it’s BIGBANG or just kpop-related in general, do not ask. Just buy.”

Our driver’s phone kept going off during the whole ride back  though, and it was that signature T-Mobile chime, so I kept thinking it was TJ from the MTV, texting us with the next challenge. (REAL WORLD/ROAD RULES CHALLENGE JOKE, YOU GUYS.)

Anyway, that concludes day 1 in Chicago. We walked 35,000 steps, not as much as Toronto, but enough to make Chooch complain. Get on our level, chump.