The Land of the Free, They Said
American immigration officials sure make you feel welcome. They're the first people you speak to upon arrival and they ask you when you intend to go home again. F and I clearly look dodgy as hell: we've already been hauled out of the line and made to take our shoes off and had our bags search in front of the prying eyes of the rest of Flight 50's passengers. We'd halved everything between us in case either bag went missing, and the guy who searched F's bag, having asked "did you pack this yourself?" looked decidely uncomfortable when the first thing he found in there was a bra and matching knickers, and he gave up looking for a bomb and hurriedly handed it back. As for the Department for Homeland Security, they wanted to know what we were doing in America, who we were staying with, why we were staying with them, where we knew them from and what they did now. This wasn't going very well at all - he clearly didn't believe that someone my partner had met on a Masters course at UCL (which he hadn't heard of and therefore didn't believe it was a real institution) was now flogging shoes in Crown Point, Indiana, and, perhaps more reasonably, he didn't understand why we wanted to come all this way in order to visit Crown Point, Indiana. Our friends in Dallas saved the day - they are both doctors, and Kristin had studied at UCLA. My payslip confirmed that I had no reason why I would want to disappear into the Midwest and become a carpark attendant - the current exchange rate means that once I had I translated my salary into dollars for him he thought I was loaded.
Our friend told us she lives "basically in Chicago". Untrue. She lives basically in small-town Indiana, in a land of water towers and telegraph poles and potholed roads that have to be resurfaced every year because the ice expands into the gaps and damages them. Everyone in the area has a pick-up truck and most of them seem to play in a bowling league (if I can figure out how to put photos on this blog I'll show you the 60-lane alley we visited.) This is because there isn't very much to do in Crown Point. You can look at the prison from which Dillinger escaped with a bar of soap (not, as I thought, by some kind of Houdiniesque trickery but by moulding it into the shape of a gun and threatening his way out) but this is now a craft centre; you can have brunch in the local diner (highly recommended); then you can go to the Mall, which isn't even in Crown Point, but just outside it, and which looks like one of those faceless factory outlets somewhere off the M6. Or you can drive 20 miles to the nearest train station and catch the once-an-hour train on its forty-minute trip into Chicago.
Crown Point, my friend told me brightly, is the second largest town in Indiana after Indioanapolis, and the county capital. It is, by Indiana standards, a hub of activity. I find this inordinately depressing. My friend now works as a customer service respresentative. She works 8-hour days and once she's been there a year she will be grudgingly granted ten days' holiday. She spends what little free time she has in a wooden hut that's inexplicably allowed to call itself an "Irish Bar" on the basis that it's green and sells Guinness, even though they play country music on the loop and serve what has (I hope through ignorance rather than malice) been called a "Black and Tan Brownie".
I was told I would like Chicago, and it is admittedly something of an oasis after the bleak monotony of the likes of Hammnod and Gary which we passed through on the train. It's also extremely chilly thanks to the breeze coming off Lake Michigan, and the mist is so low you can't see to the top of the Hancock Tower. Went to Gino's East for pizza pie, which is an excuse to make something that would otherwise be quite nice unneccessarily large and twice as bad for you. Chicago redeemed itself only by its Art Institute, which is one of the best galleries I've ever visited, outstripping even the National in both size (just) and variety of content. Here you can see various American masterpieces as well as Frank Lloyd Wright furniture and my new favourite painting, The Door by Ivan Alright, the bloke who painted Dorian Gray for the film. According to all Chicago conossieurs it's accepted wisdom that you should ignore Sears Tower and go up the Hancock instead, which has a view over the lake and a bar at the top, but the weather made this impossible. We eventually took the opportunity to go up Sears Tower on our third day as we waited for our train as it was only two blocks from Union Station. At 1,454 feet it's now only the third tallest building in the world, dwarfed by the Taipei 101 tower at 1,670 feet and narrowly beaten by the Petronas Towers in Malaysia at 1,384 feet. But, our guide tells us reproachfully, their satellite antennae make it still the tallest, it's just that you can't count those unless they are worked into the structure of the building, and that's what they did in Taipei, the cheating bastards!
Onwards - at 3.30 tomorrow I'll be in Little Rock.
Our friend told us she lives "basically in Chicago". Untrue. She lives basically in small-town Indiana, in a land of water towers and telegraph poles and potholed roads that have to be resurfaced every year because the ice expands into the gaps and damages them. Everyone in the area has a pick-up truck and most of them seem to play in a bowling league (if I can figure out how to put photos on this blog I'll show you the 60-lane alley we visited.) This is because there isn't very much to do in Crown Point. You can look at the prison from which Dillinger escaped with a bar of soap (not, as I thought, by some kind of Houdiniesque trickery but by moulding it into the shape of a gun and threatening his way out) but this is now a craft centre; you can have brunch in the local diner (highly recommended); then you can go to the Mall, which isn't even in Crown Point, but just outside it, and which looks like one of those faceless factory outlets somewhere off the M6. Or you can drive 20 miles to the nearest train station and catch the once-an-hour train on its forty-minute trip into Chicago.
Crown Point, my friend told me brightly, is the second largest town in Indiana after Indioanapolis, and the county capital. It is, by Indiana standards, a hub of activity. I find this inordinately depressing. My friend now works as a customer service respresentative. She works 8-hour days and once she's been there a year she will be grudgingly granted ten days' holiday. She spends what little free time she has in a wooden hut that's inexplicably allowed to call itself an "Irish Bar" on the basis that it's green and sells Guinness, even though they play country music on the loop and serve what has (I hope through ignorance rather than malice) been called a "Black and Tan Brownie".
I was told I would like Chicago, and it is admittedly something of an oasis after the bleak monotony of the likes of Hammnod and Gary which we passed through on the train. It's also extremely chilly thanks to the breeze coming off Lake Michigan, and the mist is so low you can't see to the top of the Hancock Tower. Went to Gino's East for pizza pie, which is an excuse to make something that would otherwise be quite nice unneccessarily large and twice as bad for you. Chicago redeemed itself only by its Art Institute, which is one of the best galleries I've ever visited, outstripping even the National in both size (just) and variety of content. Here you can see various American masterpieces as well as Frank Lloyd Wright furniture and my new favourite painting, The Door by Ivan Alright, the bloke who painted Dorian Gray for the film. According to all Chicago conossieurs it's accepted wisdom that you should ignore Sears Tower and go up the Hancock instead, which has a view over the lake and a bar at the top, but the weather made this impossible. We eventually took the opportunity to go up Sears Tower on our third day as we waited for our train as it was only two blocks from Union Station. At 1,454 feet it's now only the third tallest building in the world, dwarfed by the Taipei 101 tower at 1,670 feet and narrowly beaten by the Petronas Towers in Malaysia at 1,384 feet. But, our guide tells us reproachfully, their satellite antennae make it still the tallest, it's just that you can't count those unless they are worked into the structure of the building, and that's what they did in Taipei, the cheating bastards!
Onwards - at 3.30 tomorrow I'll be in Little Rock.
posted by RLS at 1:23 pm
2 Comments:
that's wicked about the prison! Do they teach soap carving in the craft centre? That would be truly superb.
Probably not any more.
Px
Post a Comment
<< Home