Hello from Chicago - The Field Museum and Pompeii - "Stories
from an Eruption"
Yesterday I got up early again and typed up my travel reports on
the free computer at the Arlington House. Then my friend Linda
and I made our way to one of our favourite Chicago hangouts for
breakfast: the "Bourgeois Pig Cafe" is located close to the
intersection of Fullerton and Halsted/Lincoln and is a 2 story
cozy cafe with a small sitting area and patio downstairs, and a
beautiful converted living room and balcony upstairs. I had one
of my favourite breakfast indulgences: a deluxe Belgian waffle
with strawberries, whipped cream, pecans and brown sugar, just a
sinful treat on a hungry stomach. Linda had a huge and delicious
looking foccaccia sandwich with ham and melted cheese and raved
about it as well.
Appropriately strengthened we started our explorations. We
wanted to check out a Polish area called Wickertown and took the
Fullerton bus west to Damen and south to North Street. We walked
around a pleasant neighbourhood with lots of small stores, funky
boutiques and chic little restaurants. The weather was really
clammy and cold though, so we decided to continue our
explorations indoors and head to a museum. On we hopped onto the
el-train and headed downtown to the Chicago Cultural Center, the
main informational contact point for tourists. One of the local
volunteers recommended that we go to the Field Museum and see
the Pompeii exhibit.
The Field Museum was originally incorporated in 1893 and was
renamed the Field Museum of Natural History, to honour the
Museum's first benefactor, Marshall Field. In 1921 the Museum
moved from its original location in Jackson Park to its present
site on Chicago Park District property near downtown where it is
part of a lakefront Museum Campus that includes the John G.
Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium. These three
institutions are regarded as among the finest of their kind in
the world and together attract more visits annually than any
comparable site in Chicago.
The Field Museum is currently hosting a special exhibition:
"Pompeii - Stories from an Eruption" and we decided to visit
this special exhibition. The Pompeii exhibit features jewellery,
earthenware, small tools, everyday objects, even a bathtub that
were excavated from Herculaneum and Pompeii. Room-size frescoes
and mosaics bring to life the artistic talent of these ancient
Roman towns. A little eerie were the plaster casts of victims
that had been buried in volcanic ash and when the bodies
disintegrated, they left behind a cavity in the ash that was
filled with plaster, providing a perfect cast of the victim. We
saw plaster casts of a young girl, a young man, two women
huddled against each other, even a little dog with its feet up
in the air. The plaster casts really gave you an idea of the
instantaneous nature of this catastrophe.
Informational videos and a 3-D animated feature provided a
visual representation of some of the Roman villas and public
areas, giving us a good example of what Pompeii and Herculaneum
must have looked like before the volcanic eruption. The
exhibition really showed what a catastrophic event this volcanic
eruption must have been and how people were caught completely
off-guard, unable to flee. In essence, most of the victims
choked almost instantly on the burning clouds of pyroclastic ash
that rained down on them as they were trying to escape or hiding
away in the cascades by the sea.
The show also demonstrated that today the area around Vesuvius
is extremely densely populated and a timeline indicated that the
amount of volcanic activity has noticeably increased over the
last 300 years. Today the area around Naples is one of the most
closely monitored areas on the planet where the African Plate is
subducting under the Eurasian Plate. More seismic and volcanic
activity is definitely in store for this geologically unstable
region.
After our visit to the Field Museum we walked across Grant Park
to Michigan Avenue since we needed to have one more tasty lunch
before we had to grab our luggage and start our respective
journeys home. We took the bus up Michigan Avenue, and as we
unfolded our CTA transit map to figure out what combination of
buses we had to take, the couple behind us and a young lady in
front of us volunteered their help in navigating us around their
city. With their input we chose the most appropriate route and
we both noted that we were surprised at this unsolicited but
most welcome gesture of assistance.
Once back in the Lincoln Park Area, we headed back to our
favourite place, the "Austrian Bakery" on Clark north of
Fullerton, which offers delicious samples of the type of food
that both Linda and I grew up with, dishes that are usually hard
to come by in North America. We both enjoyed a typical Austrian
dish: "Fritattensuppe", a clear beef broth with pancake strips,
and I had a Wiener Schnitzel with home-fried potatoes. It
doesn't get much more Austrian than that and we both purchased a
few baked goods before we headed off. Linda took the train back
to her town in Indiana, while I made my way through the rain to
O'Hare Airport where I was randomly selected for a thorough
frisking, and just a couple of hours later I touched down safely
on home turf in Toronto.
As always, Chicago has been a beautiful getaway and we both had
a phenomenal time. Even the cool and clammy weather wasn't able
to stop us....