How grand are we?

After a long, and thankfully uneventful journey (3.00am alarm in Vienna, to be at the airport by 4.30am) we arrived in Chicago tired and excited (a strange combination). After realising that the hotel didn't offer the free airport shuttle as I had thought, we decided after some debate (had I said already that it had been a long day?) to take a taxi.

We sped along, through the wide flat landscapes populated with big skies, highways, overhead railway lines, billboards and low-slung apartment buildings and then suddenly, as if by magic, skyscrapers appeared on the horizon. More and more and more skyscrapers until it felt like we were being swallowed by the city.

Our hotel was rather grand. We stayed at the Drake Hotel in the fashionable (!) Northside of the city and ended up with a room with a lakeside view and walk-in wardrobe that was almost as big as the flat in Vienna!