Nerve Endings Firing Away

I was in Chicago over this past weekend. I was meeting friends from high school (and junior college). The five of us were quite close in India and stayed in touch even though we were in different professional colleges. Of course, living in the same small town helped. And so did the fact that two among us got hitched. Amrut, a Lieutenant Commander in the Indian Navy, was coming to the U.S. (specifically Cincinnati) for training and since Kshitish lived 3 hours away in Toledo and Divya lived 5 hours away in Chicago, I was asked to fly down to Chicago over the weekend for an impromptu meetup (kids, see you don’t have to have a Twitter first to meet up). We were only missing Shilpa, Amrut’s wife who couldn’t join him since their kid had her exams…kindergarten exams…in the kindergarten that my mom owns and runs. Dude, I could’ve wrangled a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Now Chicago and I share an unique bond. I always have visited the windy city to meet people. The first time was a blogger meet and the second to meet up with an ex-roommate who had hitched up with another common grad school friend. And both times, it was in winter. The first was around Christmas and the second around Thanksgiving. Those aware will know Chicago winters to be a bitch. At least this time it was much warmer at 40F. I could even get away by not wearing gloves for ten whole minutes. I will spare you the details of our ‘joyous’ reunion except the fact that it wasn’t really that momentous. Of course, people change and so do things yet everyone expects them to be the same. But it was nice catching up and getting updated on everyone’s progress in life. Everyone is married now and three of us have kids so everyone worldview is not exactly the same but I’m guessing eventually we’ll all get there.

Since this wasn’t my first time in Chicago, I had already taken in the sights; how much ever you can in winter. And of course, we did them once again. We drove down to the Millennium Park, goofed around with Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, stared in awe at Frank O’Gehry’s concert stage, and walked the Magnificent Mile. We concluded our short jaunt with spiked coffee and hot chocolate at the Signature Lounge atop the John Hancock Tower. This was the only time I could see any trace of fall colors although thanks to Chicago’s windy nature, there wasn’t much either. However, there is one thing I did different this time. I did not take my precious Nikon with me on this drive to downtown. Instead I decided to shoot photos with my iPhone. The results were not bad at all and a little tweaking in Aperture, they turned out to be not half bad. As long as there is enough natural light, the iPhone camera works pretty well. Some of the photos are shown below:

Fall Colors at Millenium Park

Fall(en) Leaves

Lake Shore Drive from atop John Hancock