So, the third day of our vacation, I let everyone sleep a little later than I had the previous two days because we were going to the Sears Tower first and it didn't open til 10:00. We got a good continental breakfast in the hotel and then walked on over to the Sears tower, which was just a couple of blocks from our hotel. We passed a Giordano's pizza on the way and two of my guidebooks had mentioned it as a good place to get Chicago style pizza, so we took note. We got to the Sears tower half an hour early in case of lines, but there wasn't a line and they let us go on up to the 103rd floor. The view was great even though it was a little cloudy. We liked seeing our hotel from up high, as we'd been looking the other way just the night before. We could tell which room was ours and everything. At the Sears tower we bought bus/el passes for the day and hopped on transit to get down to the Shedd Aquarium.
At the aquarium they were having, in addition to the regular wonderful exhibits, an exhibit on Lizards and the Komodo King. We spent quite a while in there because I like lizards. The Komodo was lazy and wouldn't come look at us, but you could see him behind a log. Big lizard. We also saw a dolphin show. We watched half from the top and then went to the underwater viewing and watched the dolphins swim there. We also saw OTTERS! Sea otters and river otters. They were lively and fun. We didn't have time (as was the case most places) to see everything, but we made it to the Amazon area, the coral reef, and the penguins also. ANd the gift shop. We didn't miss a gift shop on this trip, lol. Leaving the Shedd, we went down the street to the Field Museum.
The Field is a massive natural history museum and I don't think I could even begin to talk about what we saw there, except as a list. We saw Sue the Tyrannosaurus, many other dino skeletons, a room full of gems, a beautiful walk through exhibit on the South Pacific complete with a Maori meeting house that had been moved to the museum, an ancient Egypt walk-through exhibit, and in passing, some Tibetian and Asian items. There were two special exhibits (besides Tut) that were of note. One was a display of photos from a photo album that someone managed to save from Auschwitz that showed the person's family and friends and documented the processing, sorting, work, and even people in the minutes before the gas chambers. (though there are no images of actual killing) It's apparently the only such photographic record. I would have taken Jesse in because I think it's important, but his Dad wasn't comfortable with that, so I went through it by myself (My Mom went through it by herself too, we had gotten seperated.) Anyway, it was a striking exhibit. The other special exhibit was the Underground Adventure, which pretended to shrink you and you walk through a display of what it's like right under the surface of the Earth. That was cool , and Dingo's favorite thing.
At 5:30 we had tickets to Tut at Twilight, so we queued up for that, picked up our headphones and went on in. It was several rooms of the most fantastic artifacts and if you get the audio tour, which we did, you even get extra information narrated by Omar Sharif. The items were all in astonishingly good condition and well worth seeing. At the end they had a display on scans they've done of Tut's body to try to determine more about him and the cause of death, as he was only 19 when he died. It was very interesting what new technologies have shown that weren't apparent in the scans they did in the 70's. After Tut we caught a bus back to the hotel and then walked a couple of blocks over to the Giordano's we'd seen earlier that day. I'd never had Chicago style pizza before and it was great. Huge thick pizzas just full of cheese. Yum. We ordered too much though. When it says the pizza feeds one or two, your whole family could eat it in actuality. After that, we walked (I don't know how as our feet were so freaking tired) back to the hotel and went to bed.
