One of the great places I got to visit in Chicago was the Art Institute. While in the Van Gogh section I literally LOLed (and was very close to. ROFLing – had it not been so crowded) because I was reminded of something YummYummy said in Toronto. We were checking out the goodies in the hotel room and noticed the snooze kit contained one eye mask and one, not two, earplug. YummYummy was quick with an explanation, “They must have thought Van Gogh was staying in this room.”
After several hours in the museum and tooling around the city, I met up with She’s A Hard One and Her Man. We were all rather hungry and trying to decide on a restaurant. “We could do something specific to Chicago. Maybe pizza,” said She’s A Hard One. “We could do French,” Her Man suggested. “Of course, that’s not Chicagoan – that’s just French.”
We ended up picking Korean BBQ and they suggested we change into Korean BBQ clothes. “It is really smelly,” said She’s A Hard One. “Ah,” I replied, “one of those smells that is only good when you’re in the moment.” She’s A Hard One and I quickly changed and then waited for Her Man. “He takes longer to get ready than I do,” She’s A Hard One whispered to me.
The restaurant was not in walking or easy train distance, so we decided to take a zipcar (hourly inner city car rental). Her Man was at the wheel, She’s A Hard One was in charge of navigation and I just sat back and enjoyed the ride. As we were nearing our destination we got stuck behind a very slow driver – this was extremely frustrating to Her Man, “Obviously they’re not paying for their car by the hour.”
Once we got inside the restaurant we ravenously ate our food – barely waiting for She’s A Hard One to finish cooking the meat. One of the side items, which we quite liked, was jicama. We waited some time for the waitress to return and then ordered another dish of it. She returned with cucumber and took off before we could tell her that was not what we had requested. A while later – good thing we weren’t paying her by the hour – we again requested jicama. After a lengthy exchange of verbal and visual communication she said, “Ah, you want white colored radish. You should just say.” Very Chicagoan.