Trip to Chicago

Yesterday I set off from Banbridge around 9 am to get the aircoach to Dublin airport, since I'd been advised to arrive 3.5 hours before departure at 2:30 pm. I went through security pretty quickly, and shortly therafter I cleared US immigration in the airport, which was great, and I must say more friendly than my experience of US immigration in the past. At just after 2 pm they told us all to get out and go back up, so we had to have our passports unstamped and our visas uninspected. Fun.

Turned out the radar was down in the airport and lots of flights were being cancelled. The delay was a minor irritation for me, I was travelling alone and without an ongoing connection, but it did mean around 3 hours of standing around (there were no seats left) waiting to find out if my flight would be cancelled. In the end, the flight want ahead albeit with another delay on the tarmac. There was nothing reassuring about taking off in a fog bound airport where the radar still was at "limited" capacity, whatever that meant.

The flight itself was pretty good. I hadn't flown Aer Lingus before, it was an A330 with individual media on demand screens, so, especially as I was on my own I was able to kill the time watching video content the whole journey. The only considerable irritation was the staff on PA had a Columbo like capacity to come back on-line with "another thing", frequently to repeat the same information about shopping or such like over and over again. Likewise they had a capacity to interrupt the video with text on the screen, which could not be dismissed until it timed out. They did this all too frequently, to repeat what had already been said on the PA, and often riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.

So I arrived late in Chicago, but not before flying in with a great view of the city on the left; and when I got to the hotel, the view from the front door was equally impressive.

This morning I tried hard to get myself into the new timezone, so I stayed up till around midnight local time, and got up around 6:30 am, sorted out the papers from the case and so on. The hotel has good, easy wireless access, so that's great. I left the hotel around 7:30 am to go on a shopping trip for Karen, but also to see the sights along the way navigating with the usual woeful faded black and white photocopy of a colour map. Many of the shops didn't open to 10 am which was a bit of a pain, but I was the first up the John Hancock centre observatory this morning at 9 am. It does offer stunning panaromas of the city, and you go up in what is proclaimed to be the fastest elevator in North America - it certainly is fast. I think the observatory is in the 94th floor or something similar.

On the way down the lift tells me that the John Hancock centre is "the world's most recognised building". Now steady on... I find that very unlikely. I didn't even know it existed until yesterday (though I knew about Sears, and I know who John Hancock was). I would doubt the building could even claim to be in the top 10 most recognised buildings. Perhaps this is a limited definition of "world".

I don't have talks to go to today, just to register and go to a reception, so I'm taking advantage of the time to see the city a bit, and then I'll go back to the hotel for a swim. It's hot here...