Chicago Day 2

It's Kaitie's Birthday! Whoo! She's officially 20 years old.

So we slept in in honor of Kaitie's birthday and then ate an amazing lunch at Lou Mitchell's Restaurant and Bakery. It's a famous diner in Chicago, and Kaitie wanted to go. I didn't think it would be anything special, but I had one of the best burgers of my life that morning. When we told our server Linda (the nicest old lady you ever did meet) that it was Kaitie's Birthday, she brought out a HUGE piece of 4-layer coconut frosted cake! We had just had a huge lunch, but somehow we ate that piece of cake.

After lunch we trekked off in search of someone who knew the right bus to take to Navy Pier. A nice girl at Starbucks pointed us in the right direction and we waited a while for our bus to arrive. It was awesome to take a bus around the city.
1. We were out of the cold.
2. We got to take a route we hadn't been and we saw a lot of cool buildings and architecture.
3. It was way faster and less tiring (who'd have thunk?)

We got to Navy Pier in about 10 minutes. Katie Mac nabbed some bus maps from the nice security men, and then we went inside. The Pier is really awesome. There's so much more there than I thought possible. We went in a bunch of the souvenir stores. Then we rode the Ferris Wheel and got some great pictures of the Chicago sky line. We went to see what the Shakespeare Theatre was all about, and I'm sad it wasn't open. It looked like the shows would be really good, so maybe one day I'll get to check it out. We read a sign that said the theatre was a Tony Award recipient.

We shopped in all the little shops and checked out all the vendors. I found an awesome Jackie Chan poster I wanted for my apartment next year, but unfortunately they were all out of stock. After Navy Pier we took the bus to the Red Line and then took the Red Line to the North side of Chicago to find a vegetarian diner called The Chicago Diner for Kaitie's Birthday, because she is in fact a vegetarian. The food was amazing! If I lived anywhere near this restaurant I would eat there all the time! I had the sweet potato quesadilla. I'm just going to say I'm officially hooked on Chicago food. This restaurant was located in Boi's Town, which was somewhere we wanted to go, so we killed to birds with one stone.

We took a different route back to the train station and ran across a Bookworks and we all bought some great scripts. I bought an anthology of Restoration plays! Then we rushed back to the Red Line and jumped on, getting off and onto the Brown Line which took us to Second City. We saw their 50th Anniversary show, with the touring cast. They were all very young--and very talented. They did a bunch of skits that had been performed throughout the years, and then some modern ones. They were all funny. I think I enjoyed the musical numbers the best. It was an awesome show, so we stuck around for their 3rd act which is their 'in the works' material that they test on audiences before making it a part of their repertoire. There ended up being a group of kids from a college near us, and they got a Lady Gaga parody song dedicated to them. It should have been us! It would have been so much cooler!

We took a taxi back to the hostel and then called it a night!