2.7.2012 – 2.7.2012  37 °C

Day 2 in Chicago saw us continue to melt under high heat (it’s been in the high 30s early 40s for well over a week now..) so we decided to head to the award winning Chicago Science and Industry museum (MSI– Chicago’s version of the powerhouse). This museum is the powerhouse on steroids. Think 10 times better than the powerhouse and you’ve got the MSI.

We started off watching a chemistry experiment (plenty of flames and bangs) before we headed in to see a tornado. Yep this museum has an indoor tornado! Apparently tornados are actually quite fragile, which explains why they develop and disappear so quickly. Any change (even slight) in temp, humidity or pressure can make or break a tornado. The museum also has an avalanche simulator and an indoor lightening machine. Every half hour or so the machine charges up and releases fork lightening! Amazing…. and the NOISE! We spent hours in the natural disaster section of the museum.. so long in this section that we didn’t actually see much more of the museum!

We strolled thru the human anatomy section, they have a human cyborg that is a medical simulation tool… you can learn to diagnose ailments etc on this guy!! The museum also has a whole section on transport and a huge working train set (a whole scale model of Chicago)!! Honestly we would have been lucky to have seen 20% of the whole museum and what we did see just blew us away… Totally worth a look if you are ever in Chicago!

We walked back out into the heat and headed back into town for some lunch. We spent the afternoon down at Navy Pier. Navy pier was once a daggy pier (used by the Navy amongst others) that was overhauled in the early 90s and turned into a big tourist mecca. Today it sports a mini theme park complete with a ferris wheel, theatres, shops, restaurants and bars. It’s a nice place to just stroll along and people watch. We did do some strolling but honestly spent more time people watching from the bar with a cold drink!

For dinner tonight we tried to get ourselves a Chicago pizza.. Apparently, Chicago-ans like their pizza to have a deep base that is filled with mozzarella cheese. We went to one place (recommended by LP) to discover that it had a 40-50 min wait time! Another place up the road was even worse!!! None of us were that desperate to try out the pizza so we headed to the Chinese restaurant next door for some really good Szechuan Beef.. I need to remember julienned veges with crispy beef… YUM YUM! What a way to end another great day here in Chicago!!

Song of the Day– Robert Johnson, Sweet Home Chicago