Day One: Millenium Park, Jun Kaneko, Cloud Gate, The Art Institute, Bao Wow

On our first full, proper day in Chicago, we started out with breakfast at a place called Wildberry Pancakes and Cafe, one of the few restaurants open in The Loop on Saturday morning. (Well, I mean, Starbucks was open, as was Dunkin Donuts and the restaurant attached to the hotel that specialized in $14 omelets, buuut...we choose not to exercise those options that day.) After about a 40 minute wait, we got a table and sat down to coffee and juice and a Rutherford omelet (caramelized onions, spinach, bacon, goat cheese), a Napa Valley fig omelet (figs, scallions, bacon, and havarti cheese) with strawberry pancakes for me and blueberry pancakes for Dave.

After breakfast, we crossed the street to Millennium Park and walked through part of the Jun Kaneko's tanuki sculpture exhibit there.

Jun Kaneko's ceramics interest me. He builds big, big enough that he has an enormous, specially-built kiln that he works inside so that the pieces don't have to be moved. They can be fired in place.

These pieces are several inches taller than I am (and I'm about 5'10"), but it's kind of hard to get a sense of just how big they are just from seeing them standing alone, so here's a (worse) pic that gives you a better sense of scale.

The sculptures are arranged so that you can pose with them individually or as member of a group of them, almost like a family portrait.

So what are they exactly? They are tanuki (tanuki = "raccoon dogs"), prominent in Japanese culture, especially in traditional mythology, where they are believed to be shape-shifting tricksters. The more traditional sculptures that depict tanuki are quite popular in Japan, and I often saw them displayed outside private residences and public businesses. Kaneko's modern tanuki are rather tame in comparision to those that I ran across though; most traditional tanuki sculptures proudly feature enormous testicles.

I mean, they smile big for a reason.

From the Kaneko exhibit, it was just a few short steps to one of the more famous public works of art in the city,  Anish Kapoor's 110-ton sculpture Cloud Gate (a.k.a. "The Bean").



It's impressively mind-bending, this thing. People seem to love it.



And from there, we walked over to the Art Institute to spend a leisurely six hours looking at art and artifacts. We saw several current exhibitions, including the Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity exhibit, Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, Tomoaki Suzuki's sculptures, Sharing Space: Creative Intersections in Architecture and Design, Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!, Cy Twombly: Sculpture Selections 1948-1995, as well as a chunk of the permanent collections that include Greek, Roman, Tibetan, American folk, and Impressionistic art.









Our visit also included a big chunk of time examining this, one of the best things I saw in Chicago:



 (More about that later.)

At the museum, we had a mid-morning caffeine break (iced coffee for me, iced tea for Dave) in Caffe Moderno and a late lunch at Terzo Piano (shared margherita "flat bread" with burrata, mozzarella, tomato and basil, and a grilled cheese with fried green tomato and pimento on focaccia, basil soda for Dave and an iced tea for me). As we were leaving the museum, I bought a pair of bronze and lava rock earrings in the gift shop.

It's hard to take in that much arty stuff in one day. We got back to the hotel early and all I wanted to do was close my eyes and do nothing for a long time. So I did. Dave went out to fetch dinner (bao and potstickers and ginger sodas from a local chain called Bao Wow) that we ate in the room.

And that was day one.