Today’s post brought to you by: A 2-hour long $2.29 filter coffee
Grateful for: Chicago Grind letting me set up my office here
Trying hard to accept: I can’t come here every weekend
I gather ABBA wrote that song after a week in Andersonville, Chicago.
You know you’re not in Kansas anymore, Bjorn, when:
- The tres chic Swedish bakery charges $7.50 (or 11.20 NZ dollars or 69.40 Swedish krona) for a piece of banana bread
- Every other building is a Pilates studio with massive windows so you can feel stabs of envy looking at the lithe, blond, Lululemon-clad things inside
- The ATM foreign card withdraw fee is 17% higher than any other neighbourhood
- There are tubes of organic fair trade goat’s milk mint and rosemary hand cream in the Chicago Waldorf School bathrooms
- There’s also a hygge room at the said school’s Christmas fair
- You’re only allowed in the hygge room if you’re staff (nope), parent (nope), alumni (nope), Viking descendent (could be, if it helps), donated more than 89,999,999 krona to the school in the last tax year (cheque’s in the mail), or a shameless liar who will never be here again so who cares what they say (yes!!!). It wasn’t worth it. The only seating was school chairs or oversized Ikea floor cushions.
I’ve been to a few Rudolf Steiner school fairs in my time but this one took the pepparkakor.
There were 5 cafes and bakeries and 28 stalls selling exquisite but $$$$$$ Christmas wreaths, natural cosmetics, jewellery, preserves, and everything you can possibly make out of wool, felt, sticks and rye bread.
Only at a Steiner school
Having refused out of principle to contribute even more money to the school’s coffers I set up shop in the auditorium, whipped up a couple of tuna and avocado sandwiches and listened to the school orchestra play Christmas carols.
Didn’t the Swedes have something to do with the Cod Wars? Wasn’t that something to do with salted cod? The experience obviously put them off salt for life because as yummy as these rye and lots of seeds and other things rolls looked, they were as tasteless as Joan Rivers.
I only wished I could have guessed their wifi password.
I tried ‘$20,000’ but that didn’t work. However that’s what it costs to send Olaf Jnr there for a year. Excellent form of birth control.
Judging by the million dollar historic Chicago homes in the ‘hood, the Volvo SUVs lined up outside, the drop-dead gorgeous fathers (probably all architects, Ikea product designers or stay-at-home dads) and the angelic-looking children running round the hallways, I don’t imagine there are many applications for financial aid.
I don’t suppose many of Chicago’s gangs are full of Gretas and Emils
Erik thinks about how he’s going to ask St Nicholas for a 2020 Saab SUV for Christmas this year
Even I would put up with a couple of bratty kids to live that lifestyle. But having failed to snag me a solo dad Sven I went back into hand-numbingly-cold real life and took the train to meet Izabela.
It’s weird going to a cafe in super super hip Wicker Park, Chicago, to meet up with your friend from Toronto who you used to sit next to at IR in Wellington.
Just as well Izabela had done her Google-recommendations homework because we ended up walking in the fresh (so bloody freezing cold we spent an hour trawling the racks of $1.91 t-shirts in a Walmart-size thrift store just to warm up) to look at murals.
Local boy made good. Actually Quincy produced Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ which segue ways nicely to this guy at the train station who put them 45 years younger Swedish Pilates gals to shame.
The best mural was a 5-storey high Robin Williams, which you will just have to imagine because everything below his eyes was obscured by a parked bus.
Funnily it was just up the road from ‘Pork and Mindy’ BBQ restaurant.
Izabela used to live in Peru – just thought I’d throw that in – it’s not related to the next sentence. Particularly as Peru is not Costa Rica, whose cuisine we daintily ate (scoffed till we felt sick) at Izaru restaurant – cheap as corn chips, delicious and low-fat. One of those adjectives is incorrect.
Ceviche is very healthy. 54 corn chips, 3 avocados and 4 beef quesadillas are not.
It’s now early Sunday morning and I’m back in my Edgewater office, Chicago Grind cafe. Time to go on last drool around the houses before I cram everything into my pack for the 15th time and get 2 trains to my new digs in Oak Park.
My office is also the favourite of the gun-toting local cops and a meeting of some climate change action group who should’ve been arrested for: disturbing the peace, emitting roomful of sanctimonious hot air, hogging the big table with only one small Americano between the 9 of them, and wrongly thinking the rest of us care about their protest march next Tuesday evening.
Three words sum up Oak Park: Frank. Lloyd. Wright
Actually make that 10: One. Very. Happy. Girl. From. New. Zealand.
Actually make that 15: Who. Doesn’t. Want. To. Leave.
Wonder if Frank’s got any single great, great second cousins twice removed.
I want one of these. Till he starts costing me money, whining, getting older or stopping me doing things.