Part 6 here
All day today we will spend in Chicago. The plan is to go to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, then meet with Andrey’s school classmate that lives here. But first we need to wash our clothes and hang it to dry on our handmade air dryer made from cot.
The streets in Chicago are very busy even if there is not a rush hour. Cars move back and forth, change line right in front of us and don’t show a turn signal. But Andrey had a lot of driving experience he’d gotten in Moscow so soon he behaved the same, changing lines and frighting other drivers with the size of our car.
Finally we made our way to the Museum so I could start breathing normally and stopped holding my breath. The museum’s building is huge, I guess we could spent the whole day here. Unfortunately we were too late to get the tickets to the submarine tour and Pavlik was upset a little bit. So we just went wandering, looking at the different exhibits.
The first one that we saw was the farm exhibit. We tried to milk the plastic cow, watched to the automatic milking device. Kids sat in one of the farm vehicles.
Next was the submarine. Even if we couldn’t walk inside, we still can observe it outside. We found out that it was a real submarine once, taken from German sailors. During World War II, German submarines were real threatening, they sank hundreds ships per year. One year they sank up to 15 hundred! And German generals had hoped that the submarine will never be captured by the enemy. Captains had strict instructions that in case of damages the must to sink the submarine but not let foe to capture it. So in that particular ship German soldiers had open all valves to let the sea water went inside the ship while they escaped. American sailors came to the submarine when the sea almost covered the ship and closed all valves to stop water coming inside. Next, they drained the submarine. Now that submarine rests in the museum as a reminder about war years.
After that we went to the space hall. Kids tried to operate the space shuttle during landing, catch some cargo from the space station and drive a mars rover.
That is cool!
Near that was a huge model of city and terrain. There were a lot of train models, probably ten of them, that moved around the city, mountains, went through the tunnels. If I were alone I would probably spend the whole day there. 🙂
Actually, the next hall with weather phenomenons was interesting too. We learned how avalanches appear, tried to catch a tornado with the the special equipped vehicle and even stood inside one spinning tornado. Watched lighting bolts inside the Tesla Coil.
Pavlik inside the tornado
Kate after tornado
When you are busy, time flies pretty fast. Here we found out that Museum is about to close, so we need to go out now. Again we sat in the car and tried to avoid other metal creatures that move back and forth, blink angrily with their red and white eyes and made disgusting smoke. The hardest part, by the way, was to find the parking. We decided to go to the roofed parking garage. We didn’t expect, however, that our car will be a little bit too tall, comparing it with the average Chicago car. In other words, the ceiling was so low that we had do remove the cross bars and air down tires a little bit to go through. And Inna, Andrey’s school classmate, told us later that current garage has a higher ceilings (6’7”) than the other that she parked in. Because hers was only 6’3”.
We spent a really good time with Inna and her boyfriend in the park cafe and later, walking in the park and enjoyed views of evening Chicago.
Chicago Bean
Part 8 here